IN SCIENCE, CULTURE AND WORK TORA HOLMBerG (ED.) | 1 IN SCIENCE, CULTURE AND WORK TORA HOLMBerG (ED.) 2 | | 3 Investigating Human/Animal Relations in Science, Culture and Work Tora Holmberg (ed.) Crossroads of knowledge Skrifter från Centrum för genusvetenskap Uppsala universitet Uppsala 2009 ISBN 978-91-978186-0-5 © Tora Holmberg och Centrum för genusvetenskap Denna skrift kan beställas från Uppsala universitet Centrum för genusvetenskap Box 634, 751 26 Uppsala Fax: 018-471 35 70, e-post: [email protected] Layout och sättning: Håkan Selin Tryck: Universitetstryckeriet, Uppsala 2009 4 | | 5 Preface This is a report from the Nordic workshop Investigating Human/ Animal Relations in Science, Culture and Work, held at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, in 9–10 June 2008. The report is the result of a shared effort by many people, but only a few are named in this volume. Therefore, I would like to thank the co-organizers of the workshop, Kristin Asdal, who is a researcher at TIK (Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture), Oslo Uni- versity, and Sakari Tamminen, researcher at the Department of Social Psychology, Helsinki University. The co-organizer at the Centre for Gender Research, pro- gramme administrator Ester Lindsmyr made the whole venture possible, and the financial director Riitta Mertanen managed all the details in the budget. I am also in Tomas Johannesson’s debt, who managed the technicalities of the workshop (that is, every- thing to do with computers). Of course, I also want to express my gratitude to all the par- ticipants in the workshop for contributing to the discussions, all the people who gave interesting and stimulating papers, and those who have contributed to this volume with essays. Thank you all! Moreover, I would like to thank NOS-HS for generously fund- ing this project through its call for “explorative workshops”. We immediately thought that the theme we proposed would suit the call, and obviously, it did. However, this workshop would not have taken place were it not for the research programme GenNa: Nature/Culture and Transgressive Encounters, supported by the Swedish Research Council through its funding of Centers for Gender Excellence. 4 | | 5 More information is available at our website: www.genna.gender. uu.se. The GenNa programme has also generously contributed to the workshop. Uppsala, February 2009 Tora Holmberg (workshop organizer and editor). Researcher and programme coordinator at the Centre for Gender Research, Upp- sala University 6 | | 7 Table of Contents Preface....................................................................................................................... 5 1. Investigating Human/Animal Relations..................... 9 1:1 Introduction. By Tora Holmberg....................................... 9 1:2 Interwoven Lives: Understanding Human/Animal Connections. By Lynda Birke...................................................................... 18 2. Thinking with Animals............................................................... 33 2:1 Animals in the City at the Turn of the Enlightenment: Pictures from Louis Sébastien Mercier’s Paris. By Ellen Krefting................................................................ 33 2:2 What Are the Animals Needed for in Early Sociological Texts? By Salla Tuomivaara......................................................... 44 2:3 Posthumanist Challenges to Education Theory and Practice. By Helena Pedersen......................................................... 56 2:4 Understanding Animals’ thoughts? On the Social Construction of Animals, Animal Interpretation and Human Alienation. By Pernilla Ouis................................................................... 68 2:5 Can Nonhuman Animals Have Cultural Notions of Sex? By Pär Segerdahl................................................................. 76 3. Animal/Human Culture........................................................... 85 3:1 A Fatal Visit to Venice: The Transformation of an Indian Elephant. By Liv Emma Thorsen................................................... 85 6 | | 7 3:2 Pedigree and Breeding: Love, Status and Control. By Rebekah Fox............................................................................ 97 3:3 Creating the Comfortable Cow – Discourses on Animal Protection and Production in Late 19th-century Danish Agriculture. By Anne Katrine Gjerløff................................................... 114 3:4 Narrating the Cow: The Construction of Cultural Human/Animal Relationships in Written Narratives. By Taija Kaarlenkaski............................................................ 122 4. Scientific Animals................................................................................... 133 4:1 The Econologics of Genetic Autonomy – Ex-situ Genetic Resources and Corporeal Articulations of Interests. By Sakari Tamminen............................................................... 133 4:2 Lifeworlds of the Pig: Towards a Cartography of Porcine/Human Entanglements. A Proposed Case Study of the Danish Pig Between the Production of Meat and Medicine By Marie Paldam Folker, Mette Nordahl Svendsen and Lene Koch.......... 142 4:3 Anthropologists in the World of Insects. By Karin Dirke........................................................................... 154 4:4 Subjected to Parliament II. By Kristin Asdal........................................................................ 164 4:5 Negotiating a Standard. By Tone Druglitrø................................................................... 172 4:6 Handling Transgenic Dilemmas in Scientific Practice. By Tora Holmberg.................................................................. 182 List of Contributors.................................................................................... 189 8 | INTRODUCTION | 9 1. INVEstiGatinG HUMan/AniMal RElatiOns 1: 1 Introduction | TORA HOLMBerG The study of human/animal relations is a fascinating but still fairly unexplored area. One of the reasons why the social sciences and humanities in general have been reluctant to deal with this is- sue is the classical nature/culture divide. While “society” consists of humans and their interaction in institutions and culture, other animals become excluded and are conceptualized as “nature”. On the one hand, the presence of animals can thereby “decivilize” hu- man activities and urban places. But on the other hand, there is a strong Western tradition of linking the treatment of other ani- mals with degrees of civilization: the more “humane”, the higher the civilization. Potentially this points to an interesting openness of categories and flexibility in the understanding of humans and other animals. This potential openness creates a space for ques- tioning discourses and truths that are usually taken for granted, and this is where the critical potential of human/animal studies lies. Internationally, human/animal studies (HAS) is a growing interdisciplinary field with specialized journals, conferences and networks (see Birke’s contribution in this volume). Nevertheless, in the Nordic countries, it is still quite a small and divided com- munity of researchers, and the explorative Nordic workshop was thus a means to support and consolidate the building of a human/ animal studies research network. In doing so, we drew on the ex- 8 | INTRODUCTION | 9 periences we had made and the contacts we had gained from the international conference Society, Animals and Gender, held at the Centre for Gender Research in Uppsala in August 2007. With funding from NOS-HS and the Swedish Research Coun- cil via the research programme GenNa: Nature/Culture and Trans- gressive Encounters, we organized a two-day workshop 9–10 June 2008. The aim of the workshop was to continue the building of a sustainable interdisciplinary network of Nordic researchers with- in the area of human/animal studies, and to draw up plans for new research collaborations and project applications. The themes of the workshop included human/animal relations in science, culture and work and the workshop was consequently called Investigat- ing Human/Animal Relations in Science, Culture and Work. The workshop was held at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Sweden. Our keynote speaker was Professor Lynda Birke from the UK, well known for her many years of research on both biology and feminist theory and human/animal relations. Lynda Birke, her- self with an interdisciplinary background in biology and feminist studies, is the author of a countless number of publications, for example Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (1994) Feminism and the Biological Body (1999) and most recently The Sacrifice (together with Mike Michael and Arnold Arluke, 2007). Since human-animal studies is a truly interdisciplinary field, we were keen on inviting participants from a variety of disciplines. Even so, most of our participants came from the humanities or the social sciences. Out of 25 participants, five had a background in the natural sciences. This bias was not intentional, but reflects the composition of competences in general in this field. The key 10 | TORA HOLMBERG INTRODUCTION | 11 idea was to create a workshop atmosphere. To fulfil the aims of the workshop, we got the opportunity to listen to and discuss ongoing research in three thematically divided sessions; theoriz- ing animals, animal/human cultures and scientific animals. The workshop was held in English. Thinking with Animals Sociologists Adrian Franklin and Robert