| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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not aware of and do not act upon the anti-Cartesian understandings of animals that have been explored in other disciplines is also problematic, at least in respect to the ethnographic exploration I made of laboratories that undertake animal research. As I will suggest throughout this book, practice in the laboratory context I explored did not pivot on detachment, even when rodent research animals were being regarded in the laboratory as units of analytic research equipment. I here explore the variety of attachments that connected rodent research animals with scientific investigators in different ways, which were critical to the practice of science—and, as the informants in my study insisted––to the practice of good science.
Particular relationships between rodent research animals and scientists arose out of the polar, ambiguous, and ambivalent locations of rats and mice in the context of a suite of modern research laboratories in which I undertook ethnographic research over a period of 1 year. The research participants included 31 scientists—immunologists, virologists, and neuroscientists—who were working with either rats or mice. In this book, I examine the ways in which mice and rats occupied polar positions as both ‘animals’ compared to the humans in the lab and as inanimate equipment, in contrast to the animate status of the humans therein. I also examine the ways in which rats and mice occupy ambiguous and ambivalent positions between the polar opposites of humanity and animality and between disposable laboratory equipment and animate beings capable of making relationships with people in the laboratory. Mice and rats were understood by scientists to have more than one meaning, and they simultaneously represented opposed and conflicting characteristics and values. The movement of research animals across the divides that have separated scientist investigators and research animals as Baconian dominators and research equipment, respectively (see Acampora, 2006), might well give one cause to reflect about what one thinks one knows about scientists and animals and how they relate to and with one another within the scientific coordinates of the modern research laboratory.
The speci-al and mammalian qualities of rat and mouse research animals were drawn out by the scientists in this study to indicate and