| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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describe both movements across animal-human and animate-inanimate divides and situations in which research animals remained firmly on one side or the other of a division. The invocation of these terms and the positions they referenced had particular consequences for the research animals, the scientists, and scientific practice.
I use the language of kinship to examine the ambiguities, ambivalences, and polarities I found in operation in the laboratory. As Latour (2004), Haraway (1997), and S. Franklin (2001) have each suggested, the strict (modernist) divide has been challenged by biotechnology. It can be useful to employ the language of kinship to explore the ways in which modernist divisions between humans and animals have been destabilised by biotechnology and its practices. In the examination I make of laboratory-based human-animal relationships, I seek to examine the fruits of such destabilisation. Anthropologists have, at least to some extent, reconsidered the scope for the study of kinship in post-Schneiderian terms (see, for example, Feeley-Harnik, 2001). Although for the most part these revisitations make comparisons between humans and animals on the basis of familial relationships, I seek to do something slightly different when I make recourse to kinship. Specifically, I use it first to demonstrate the ways in which animals and humans are considered to be biologically and genetically related to one another, which effects a crossing of the human-animal divide in the laboratory. Second, I use it to speak to a fleshy and indistinctive relatedness that rodent research animals and human scientists made with one another in their interactions in the laboratory space.
Between Human and Animal
I first apply the language of kinship (as, indeed, the scientists in this study did) to examine the location of rats and mice in relation to the poles of humanity and animality. I explore the ways in which the scientists in this study linked humans and rat and mouse research animals in terms of their shared biological and genetic kinship. Shared kinship in these terms links humans and animals as like beings and diminishes