「自然」の二重性 : 神経科学の実験室における動物と研究者(<特集>自然と社会の民族誌-動物と人間の連続性)

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Borrowing Descola & Palsson's critique on Nature/Society dichotomy (1996), I examine the concepts of the duality of nature conceived by Japanese experimental neuroscientists. That duality exists between the continuity and discontinuity of scientists and their animal sacrifices. In my argument process, I also discuss whether a continuity or discontinuity exists among those three components, as follows: (1) human beings, including experimental neurophysiologists, (2) the experimental animals that have both individual characteristics and vertebrate biological universalities, and (3) the recording machines that are the essential media bridging the concepts of nature and scientific fact. My fieldwork has been carried out from May 2005 to the present in a neurophysiology laboratory studying visual perceptions at a university in western Japan. I examined Michel Lynch's hypothesis (1988) on experimental animals as "ritual sacrifices," rejecting it for the following reason. While the processes of rituals and animal experiments are superficially similar, it sometimes emerges as a different recovery process in the latter case as the experiments tend to fail, while the former never does. In the next section, I give an ethnographic description of how experimental animals are treated during neurophysiological experiments. Although the experiments are not open to ordinary people, including animal rights activists, the outcome should be open as a cultural process owing to a certain justification of its scientific procedure. By that procedure, in the scientists' imagination and feeling, the experimental animals-which have an individual character in the pre-experiment phase-are transformed discontinuously to objective matters after the experiment. The experimental scientists are not precisely aware of that contradictory transformation. Also, I focus on how scientists acquire the "facts" of experimental data and interpret them as the contents of nature or scientific truth by legitimizing them according to established or authenticated protocols, by tradition. In my study, the Japanese scientists' concepts of nature or scientific truth-not represented in an ordinary conversational setting-may appear in terms of scientific fact, and sometimes focus on hybrid components in experimental animals, recording machines, and scientific data. In such a case, experimental neurophysiologists tend to accept not only the Western dichotomy between nature and culture, but also other dichotomies in subsequent levels dividing nature between the domain of the human nature of continuity with animals and that of the animals' nature of discontinuity with humans.
2012-03-31

「自然」の二重性 : 神経科学の実験室における動物と研究者(<特集>自然と社会の民族誌-動物と人間の連続性)

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