| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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modern research laboratory, they occupy positions as weapons in the fight against human diseases.
Their capacity to occur simultaneously in more than one category of meaning means that mice and rats not only occur at the polar reaches of people’s imaginations, but they can also be the loci of slippages and indistinction between many polar categories. Polarity, ambiguity, and ambivalence set up a number of possibilities for rat/mouse-human relations generally and also mark the relationships between scientists and rodent research animals that occur within the confines of the research laboratory, where they embody directly opposing positions and meanings, and present simultaneous and conflicting meanings, which are sometimes reconciled. This is an ethnographically based examination of some of the possibilities that arise for rodent-human relationships in the context of the modern scientific research laboratory.
My ethnographic examination of polarity, ambiguity, and ambivalence stands in stark contrast to recent examinations of rodent-human relationships in the context of the modern laboratory. Acampora, for example, in his recent book-length treatment of the topic, Corporal Compassion (2006), insisted that humans and animals occupy fixed, polar positions relative to each other in the modern research laboratory; his book calls for the radicalisation of such relations. In Acampora’s estimation, the detached scientific practitioner operates from her position on the powerful human side of the Great Divide while the animal suffers her pursuit of data in its position as wholly subjected to scientific inquiry.
Where Acampora recognised the possibilities for kinship and relatedness between human and nonhuman animals in other contexts outside the lab, he characterised the domain of science as one in which these possibilities do not emerge; indeed, his book is offered as an antidote to this situation. Acampora is an accomplished theoretician in the area of human-animal relatedness and is most adept in his use of phenomenological works to elucidate the area of animal-human relatedness. However, his willingness to treat science that is concerned with animal research as a bounded domain in which animal-human relatedness does not operate is problematic. His equal willingness to suggest that scientists are