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Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object: Laboratory Culture and Ritual Practice in the Neurosciences
Michael E. Lynch
Department of Sociology, Boston University, 96-100 Cummington Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.
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.
Social Studies of Science, Vol. 18, No. 2,
265-289 (1988)
DOI: 10.1177/030631288018002004
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