In light of these foci, several premises inform this study. First, if—as Joan Tronto (2009) asserts—boundaries are sites where moral dilemmas proliferate, then one must also be alert to obscured aspects of everyday life. I maintain that ethnographic engagement, in which associated methodologies are designed to uncover the deeper structures of quotidian life, is especially effective in such contexts. An investigation of scientific morality presents special challenges because, as noted above, experimental lab science (not unlike organ transplantation and still other realms of clinical medicine) lays claim to a specialized lexicon that can effectively erase competing sources of knowledge. For example, whereas emotional attachment may be an inevitable outcome of human-animal encounters in research, one learns early in one’s career that affective responses are discouraged and, even, taboo. Death presents still other quandaries: although research animals die or are killed at the end of many experiments, death talk is strangely absent from laboratory contexts. In turn, whereas research procedures may be physically or emotionally painful for animals, these realities inevitably fall under the rubric of animal welfare but not suffering. These examples do not simply define unquestioned regimes of practice; as I demonstrate throughout this work, they also expose moral quandaries and spark moral action. In light of this, I follow the lead of Monica Casper and Lisa Moore: Animal Ethos strives to be an ethnography “of that which is not always observable” (2009, 10), and of the entangled themes of absence and presence (Bille, Hastrup, and Sorensen 2010) that pervade lab personnel’s efforts to wrestle privately with moral principles, thought, and sentiment.
A second premise concerns a disciplinary boundary, involving an important distinction I make elsewhere (see Sharp 2013, 3–9, 15–19) between (bio)ethics and morality. As I am often told by lab-based researchers, codified, bioethical principles determine what can or should be done (or not done) in animal science; in contrast, “morality” does not belong within the scientific lexicon but instead is regarded as the purview of philosophy and religion. As a result, morality defines an elusive category of analysis. As I demonstrate, moral thought and action—manifested as personal, private, informal, and serendipitous—nevertheless proliferate in science. Whereas much has been written on the ethics of animal welfare, we know very little of quotidian moral thought in science. Animal Ethos is an effort to rectify this discrepancy.
This distinction between ethics and morality informs a third key premise. As my previous research demonstrates (Sharp 2009a, 2011b), highly experimental realms prove to be especially productive sites for investigating morality precisely because associated thought and action have yet to be schematized under the regulatory apparati of bioethics. As such, the quotidian dimensions of morality expose what otherwise remains a ghostly presence (Gordon 1997) of sorts in lab science. This stems from a lack of sanctioned vocabulary and concepts for speaking in moral terms about one’s research endeavors. In essence, codified frameworks bear the power to dominate, obscure, and devalue informal, private struggles and concerns. Yet the presence of animals in laboratories—mammals especially, I maintain—frustrate blanket acceptance of ethical codes of conduct. Animal Ethos illuminates the productive power of interspecies encounters to provoke moral thought, introspection, and reflexivity.
EVERYDAY MORALITY IN LABORATORY PRACTICE
The local stops at many stations; it is the slow train.
It does not race above ground but moves along it.
As it crosses the terrain it slows our gaze and concentrates our attention.
It allows us to see what is in-between.
MICHAEL LAMBEK, “Catching the Local”
Morality, as an analytical category, has long preoccupied anthropologists, where localized, ethnographic research is driven by the desire to decipher the deeper meanings and structures of human thought and action.3 The discipline has, nevertheless, witnessed an effervescent revival or “renewed vigor” (Keane 2014, 3) of theoretical interest in morality, especially within the last fifteen years or so.4 Animal Ethos falls within a growing canon of specifically ethnographic projects that address what is variously known as “local,” “everyday,” or “ordinary” moralities and ethics (Brodwin 2013; Das 2012; Lambek 2010, 2011; Zigon 2008), in which analyses focus most keenly on contexts marked by ambiguity, uncertainty, or incongruity. The goal is not to find resolution based on widely accepted, sanctioned principles of conduct within a circumscribed community (as would be the objective, for instance, of a bioethics consultant). Rather, associated scholarship posits that quotidian experience invigorates moral responses. Indeed, resolution may not be possible nor, even, be an immediate goal, a situation Thomas Beidelman identified as the “moral imaginary” (1993) and Cheryl Mattingly, more recently, termed the “moral laboratories” of daily life (2014). An important point here, in the context of my own work at least, is not that resolution remains out of reach but that the wrestling associated with moral conundrums is context specific, temporal, ever evolving (and, thus, rarely static) and, often, open-ended. These processes entail questioning, struggle, and self-examination, evidenced in quotidian life.
Throughout this work I draw a sharp distinction between “ethics” and “morality.” In medico-scientific contexts, I have found it helpful to situate the former within the field of bioethics, whereas the latter involves special forms of imaginative introspection. In the United States, bioethical behavior is informed by mandated training and regular (re)certification, and it is subject to inspection and oversight by regulatory bodies. (In animal research, this often involves the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, which inspects laboratories, and USDA-mandated Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, or IACUCs, which are institution-specific ethics review boards). For the purposes of this study, bioethics defines the parameters of what one may and may not do in a lab (or to a lab animal). In contrast, moral behavior, I maintain, is creative and serendipitous, encompassing existential realms of experience (Jackson 2012) whose effects may loop back (Hacking 1995) and inform subsequent deeds and ideas. And whereas bioethical principles unquestionably define the boundaries and bedrock of professional behavior, throughout this book I am most interested in the quirkier realm of morality, where one encounters evidence of how a range of personnel within a lab’s labor hierarchy grapple with the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of “everyday” or “ordinary” practices that comprise experimental animal use.
This focus on the “ordinary” entails, by way of Michael Lambek’s metaphor, taking “the slow train” as a means to perceive the “in-between.” Ethnographic engagement necessitates sustained attention to the localized, quotidian, and mundane aspects of life in order to discern how people make sense of their worlds. Attentiveness to the mundane is especially well suited to the study of science, as exemplified by ethnographically inspired sustained engagement within the field of science and technology studies (STS) as championed by Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, John Law, and others (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010).5 Latour exemplifies this approach in his essay “Circulating Reference,” within which he pays meticulous attention to the various ways that members of an interdisciplinary research team engage in studying a swath of Amazonian terrain, driven by a shared desire to determine whether the savannah or the forest is retreating. Together, they map out their findings not merely on, say, pieces of paper and grids of soil samples, but by transforming a café—along with its tables and chairs—into a map of the domain under study. In the end, their shared assessments hinge on a lowly earthworm whose subterranean activities alter the soil and make it conducive to forest growth (Latour 1999). One encounters the same meticulous quality in Annemarie Mol’s study of atherosclerosis as evidencing a “body multiple” (2002) and, again, in Mette Svendsen and Lene Koch’s work in a Danish research lab, where their attentiveness to a range of quotidian practices reveals how premature piglets are sometimes vulnerable baby animals and at other times research objects, proxies for human neonates, data points, or deceased creatures ready for necropsy. Such painstaking approaches to