“Figure and Ground” in Studies of the Everyday
In her essay “On Space and Depth,” Marilyn Strathern proposes the “commonplace technique … of figure-ground reversal” as an effective mode of anthropological analysis (and, I would argue, ethnographic engagement). According to Strathern, this approach “by itself simply draws on habits of perception. It may, however, be combined with certain conceptions of the act of interpretation itself. The result is then an oscillation between perspectives that appear to summon quite different approaches to the world” (2002, 88). As she explains (in ways reminiscent of Lambek’s slow train), “If interpretation ‘stops’ movement in the attention to the movement around it, then in that attention the world also appears full of stopped, singular … ‘things’ or ‘events’ or ‘relations,’” thereby “bringing entities, human or abstract, into play with one another” (2002, 92). This attentiveness to the “quotidian oscillation” of ground and figure fosters an analytical stance that is alert to “either depth or surface” (109).
The effectiveness of “localized” attention to figure-ground reversal is beautifully realized in Veena Das’s essay “Ordinary Ethics,” in which she tracks everyday evidence of the vagaries of human vulnerability (2012, 133). As Das explains, “In the low-income neighborhoods in Delhi … I came to recognize the delicacy of maintaining regard for others through the minutest of gestures” (135). An especially poignant example involves a woman leaving an upturned stool on a “threshold as a sign that she intended to resume [a neighborhood quarrel] … the next day,” once the men of their households left for work in the morning, because “it did not seem right to many women to confront a tired man who had braved the heat and dust of the streets to be confronted with an atmosphere of discord.” As Das underscores, women’s efforts to protect the serenity of home life were informed by an array of other moral principles (including deference to patriarchal household structure and the threat of domestic violence).
When Das foregrounds, in Strathern’s sense, the moral relevance of an ordinary, upturned stool, she proffers an important intervention pertinent to my own project. As she explains, “The possibility of speaking of ordinary ethics allows us also to think of the unethical as growing with the forms of life that people inhabit—it is, thus, not a matter of eliciting opinions about what behavior is considered ethical or unethical, or of cataloguing cultural practices on which we can bring judgment from an objective, distant position but rather of seeing how forms of life grow particular dispositions” (2012, 135–36). These “ordinary” “forms of life” are methodologically discerned through silent gestures, speech, and personal narration (136; see also Das 1997). As Jarrett Zigon, in turn, asserts, “special attention to forms of everyday language-use is essential to anthropological studies of local moralities” precisely because language “allows for the enactment of a certain range of possible moral worlds” (2008, 152). As we shall see, Animal Ethos is in many ways a study of how people talk about the everyday aspects of their work-related lives.
Sanctioned Speech and Lab Labor Hierarchies
The analytical challenges associated with this “quotidian oscillation” (Strathern 2002, 107) between figure and ground, or “view … and counterview” (89) of the “ordinary” (Das 2012; Lambek 2010), are soon realized in the ways lab personnel talk about the worlds they inhabit. A sanctioned lexicon and associated taboo terms and topics together present a case in point. Sole attention to the former would effectively erase any evidence of the latter, and herein lies a conundrum that troubles my current study. Throughout Animal Ethos I strive to counteract this phenomenon by recognizing the synergistic relationship between absence and presence (Bille, Sørensen, and Hastrup 2010; Casper and Moore 2009; Leder 1990), paired with the understanding of “entities, human or abstract” as potentially “multiple” (Mol 2002). Rephrased, sanctioned words and actions might signal still others that are absent or prohibited. Alongside the linguistic and behavioral tropes of quotidian laboratory life, attention to the animals and objects that populate and clutter such worlds similarly reveals complexities of meaning and value that might otherwise be overlooked and, thus, obscured.
For instance, and as noted earlier, death talk is carefully monitored in labs. Many laboratory experiments are designed as “terminal,” entailing the killing of the animal in anticipation of necropsy. Detailed protocols mandate how, when, and by whom such procedures are performed, and they fall under the rubric of animal welfare laws, regulations, and guidelines at national, state, local, institutional, and disciplinary levels. How one speaks of and describes an animal’s death is likewise circumscribed by a fixed lexicon of permissible terms. One never speaks of “killing” animals; instead, they are “culled,” “sacrificed,” “euthanized,” or “terminated.” These terms can be context specific: one “culls” a “batch” of newborns, “sacrifices” or “euthanizes” a research subject, and “terminates” an undervalued animal. One’s station within a lab’s labor hierarchy might also direct word choice: in the course of my project, researchers generally preferred “sacrifice,” whereas animal technicians and veterinarians more typically spoke of “euthanizing” animals. Finally, the values assigned to particular animals or species affects one’s phrasing: one might speak of “terminating” many mice, but one would never apply this term to a favorite research macaque. This “quotidian oscillation” of specialized language reflects otherwise hidden moral understandings. As Das reminds us, too, taboos associated with various terms expose the “unethical,” where sanctioned and unsanctioned speech, when taken together, enable the anthropologist to access morality “with the help of a vocabulary of rules and infringement” (Das 2012, 134, italics added).
Fieldwork entails mastering key terms and associated vocabulary, and I soon found that speech registers varied as I moved within and across labor hierarchies. In response, I regularly asked interviewees to describe how and when they used various terms for animals, procedures, and other aspects of their daily work. Death talk aside, a term that proved particularly thorny was “experiment(al).” As I describe later in this chapter and elsewhere in the book, animal activism looms large as a serious social threat to lab researchers, and lab personnel are cognizant of and resistant to the visual and rhetorical tropes employed by activists to sway public opinion. Like “kill,” “experimental” exemplifies a moral flashpoint of discourse because of its association with vivisection (a term that connotes the heartless employment of live animals in science).7 Lab personnel are passionate about their work, and animal technicians (also known as “animal care technicians,” “caretakers,” or, far less frequently, “caregivers”) are especially outspoken in this regard. Some animal caretakers I interviewed loathed the term “experimental” and urged me to speak instead of “research” animals to foreground human-animal partnerships. Research scientists, however, regarded “experimental” as a neutral term that describes the essence of their daily activities and highlights the workings of a rigorous, scientific method.
Such terms might well be thought of as “deadly words” (Favret-Saada 1980) because when enacted in speech, they signal troubled moral domains. Throughout the course of writing this book, I have