Abstract
Taking up the body turn in sociology, this paper discusses scientific practices as embodied action from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenological theory of the “Body”. Based on ethnographic data on a biology laboratory it will discuss the importance of the scientist’s Body for the performance of scientific activities. Successful researchers have to be skilled workers using their embodied knowledge for the process of tinkering towards the material transformation of their objects for data production. The researcher’s body then is an instrument of measuring as well as a kind of archive of knowing. Their body becomes a disciplined instrument which has its own place and function inside the laboratory. Furthermore, the appresentational apperception of Bodies (Husserl) is being discussed as a basis for the emotional and ethical concerns towards laboratory-animals. Attitudes towards animals in the laboratory setting (as well as elsewhere) are highly emotional. Nevertheless, following the literature of the sociology of the body, those emotional reactions still follow certain cultural patterns which themselves can be understood as embodied ways of knowing “right” or “wrong”. Besides as an instrument, the scientist’s body can also be understood as a resource of emotional attachment towards animals. It is an instrument for performing transformation as well as one for caring.
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Notes
The material presented in E-1 to E-9 are translated and slightly shortened excerpts from field-notes and interviews from an immunology-laboratory I was allowed to visit and observe between spring 2005 and 2008.
In using “body” for “Körper” and “Body” for “Leib” I follow the translation of Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Husserl 1989: XIV–XV): “German has two terms for what in English is designated by the single word, “body”. The distinction made in German is that between Körper, inanimate physical matter, and Leib, the animated flesh of an animal or human being. Both these terms would ordinarily be best rendered simply as “body” in English, the context determining the proper sense. But Husserl often plays on the distinction between these passages intelligible. We are proposing, then, to translate Leib as “Body” (with a capital) and Körper as “body,” and the same applies to the derivate words, “bodily,” “corporeal,” etc. Leibkörper thus becomes “Corporeal body”. This stratagem was chosen as the most simple and as having a precedent in the analogous (a limited analogy, of course) distinction between Objekt (“Object”) and Gegenstand (“object”). Just as, for Husserl, Gegenstand is the more general term, encompassing anything at all that can be intended in any way, a sensation, for example, and Objekte are only certain kinds of Gegenstände, intersubjective ones, so Körper is more general: i.e., every Objekt is an object, but not vice versa, and in the same manner every Body is a body”. Compare Dorion Cairns on “Leib” in his “Guide for Translating Husserl” (Cairns 1973: 79): “Leib (animate) organism (body). Not “living body”. So far as possible save “body” for “Körper””.
One might suggest that some kind of “bracketing” the natural attitude towards animals might as well apply to other professions concerned with the killing of animals.
For an overview on the general principles, problems, and regulations of the welfare of laboratory animals, see the contributions in Kaliste (2004).
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Acknowledgments
This article is based on a paper held at the 4S-Annual Meeting 2007 in Montreal and is part of a larger research project “Social Frames of Ethics in the Scientific Practices of Life-Sciences” (APART 11084), financed by the Austrian Academy of Science (ÖAW) (2005-2008). My thanks go to the observed immunology research group.
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Bischur, D. Animated Bodies in Immunological Practices: Craftsmanship, Embodied Knowledge, Emotions and Attitudes Toward Animals. Hum Stud 34, 407–429 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9205-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9205-x