Abstract

SOUZA, Iara Maria de Almeida. Experimental lives: humans and rodents in the lab. Etnográfica [online]. 2013, vol.17, n.2, pp.241-268. ISSN 0873-6561.

Anthropology’s renewed interest in the study of human-animal relations leads to considerations regarding the ways in which the life and death of various living organisms are connected to human worlds. This implies a definition of the common world as a wider field of relations, inhabited by a myriad of beings with which humans are enmeshed. Closely in tune with the questions raised by the anthropological literature on human-animal relations, the question that guides the following discussion is how to think, on the basis of this approach, relations between researchers and mice in the laboratory, when we know that these relations are characterized in a very assertive and outright manner as merely instrumental. Based on fieldwork carried out in the laboratory of a Brazilian public institution for scientific research, the article explores the practical meaning of instrumentality in this context (the formal procedures for dealing with animals, the production of an animal model of disease, the instrumental apparatus in which the rodents are inserted). It also addresses the animals’ modes of answering to the experimental context and points to the existence of relations between researchers and rodents that are irreducible to objectification.

Keywords : animal model; multispecies ethnography; biotechnology; experimental systems; bioterium; rodents.

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