Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object: Laboratory Culture and Ritual Practice in the Neurosciences

Abstract

The term `sacrifice' is used by experimental biologists to describe methods for killing laboratory specimens. In Western societies, `sacrifice' usually connotes a process of `making sacred', a process Durkheim and his followers interpreted as a ritual transformation between `profane' and `sacred' realms. This paper examines whether `sacrifice' in the experimental context bears any relation to such traditional usage, or whether, as animal rights advocates argue, the term is no more than a euphemism for brutal and unnecessary slaughter. Drawing on ethnographic observations of laboratory practice, the paper argues that `sacrifice' means much more than simply killing a specimen, and that the violence done to the animal victim is part of a systematic `consecration' of its body to transform it into a bearer of transcendental significances. While scientists do not treat their practices as ceremonial rituals endowed with religious meaning, laboratory `sacrifice' is a part of a sequence of procedures through which the naturalistic animal body is transformed into an abstracted analytic object with generalized significance for members of the research community.

From Experimental Interaction to the Brain as the Epistemic Object of Neurobiology

“…Sometimes the organism played some kind of preliminary role. It had to be killed, some of its parts becoming an epistemic object only after its death (Lynch 1988). My data suggests that in many fields of neurobiology, the living organism cannot be transformed completely into a technical and/or epistemic object.…”

“…Empirical analysis of electrophysiological experimentation on monkeys seems to fall in a noman's-land between established regions of interest. Scientific studies on animal experimentation focus on experiments on mice and rats and sometimes dogs (Birke et al 2006;Lynch 1988;Michael and Birke 1994;Solot and Arluke 1997). Where research on primates is of interest, it includes mainly the observation of noninvasive biological research, such as Donna Haraway's (1990) work on primatologists and their research objects, Lawrence Wieder's (1987) study on face-to-face-interactions between primatologists and apes, or Bruno Latour's (1994) analysis of the observation of monkey interactions.…”

Knowing Insects: Hosts, Vectors and Companions of Science

“…Their proximity, size and number makes them easy to collect, count and cultivate; their empathetic distance, alien form and short life spans expunges their dissections of violence and their deaths of sacrifice (cf. Lynch, 1988). They are fundamentally 'handy', a biological footing for taxonomic order, an inscription device for chemical processes.…”

Corpos comensuráveis: produção de modelos animais nas ciências biomédicas

“…Sendo essa a minha questão principal, poderia parecer óbvio que o artigo começasse abordando as ações que têm lugar no biotério, envolvendo a transformação do "animal vivo" em "animal analítico" (Lynch, 1988). No entanto, optei por tomar, de início, alguma distância com relação ao local em que camundongos e pesquisadores se confrontam de modo mais direto.…”

“…Aí se completa a transição de "animal naturalístico" para "animal analítico" (Lynch, 1988). A atividade de produção de fragmentos de tecidos fi xados em lâminas, congelados e rotulados é responsável por extrair do animal tudo que se encontrava dado potencialmente no camundongo vivo.…”