Animals incorporated

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Medicine Anthropology Theory 2(2): 153–155; https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.2.2.263
© Nathalie Porter, 2015. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
THE NIGHTSTAND
Animals incorporated
Natalie Porter
I used to be very restrictive about how I incorporated animal products into my body and
lifestyle. As a teenager I adopted a strictly vegetarian diet, eschewed leather, and refused
products tested on animals. I continued these habits for over a decade, picking up health and
environmental arguments to support my cause along the way.
But these habits changed when I began engaging in ethnographic research on bird flu in
Vietnam. Anxious to partake in the everyday activities of Vietnamese poultry farmers I
embraced a credo to just try everything, and today, six years later, there are only one or two
animal products that I resolutely avoid. Fieldwork has changed more than my consumption
habits. I have recently begun conducting multispecies research at US microbiology labs,
where I participate in the manipulation and ‘sacrifice’ of experimental animals.
I do sit uncomfortably with these fleshy interactions, and I often wonder about the
hierarchies of life that legitimate them. What can practices of animal incorporation tell us
about how we render bodies and value lives?
In The Transplant Imaginary: Mechanical Hearts, Animal Parts, and Moral Thinking in Experimental
Science, Leslie Sharp (2014) explores xenotransplantation – efforts to harvest organs from
animals for use in humans. She is interested in exploring the moral thinking of the scientists
involved in such practices: How do they imagine and reconfigure human bodies in relation
to animal ‘donors’? How do they articulate the promises, challenges, and dangers of
interspecies organ transfer?
Sharp suggests that xeno science fosters ambivalence. Scientists express kindredness with
animal subjects but also treat them as expendable research objects. This is particularly true in
the context of promissory markets. To attract venture capital, scientists struggle to balance

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the demands of generating and harvesting viable organs with their commitment to upholding
the integrity of animal life. Scientists temper the market value of animal parts with a moral
framing that evaluates scientific rigor alongside animal welfare.
The ambivalence surrounding experimental animals goes beyond considerations of animal
welfare, however, to encompass questions about what it means to actually ‘embody
interspeciality’. To what extent does animal incorporation upset the integrity of human
bodies? Sharp shows that while xeno scientists may view boundary crossing as ingenious in
experimental contexts, they are nevertheless troubled by the prospect of sustaining such
crossings within a human body. Delineating which humans are suitable for
xenotransplantation involves uncomfortable evaluations of life both within and across
species.
Discomfort also surfaces in Gewertz and Errington’s (2010) account of the controversial
trade in, and consumption of, inexpensive, fatty cuts of lamb. In Cheap Meat: Flap Food
Nations in the Pacific Islands, the authors follow flap commodities – tough, gristly cuts of lamb
that contain thick bands of fat deemed inedible by ‘First World’ consumers – as they move
from farms in Australia and New Zealand to markets across the Pacific Islands. This is a
story about hierarchies of animal flesh and the bodies that consume it.
The consumption of meat flaps, the authors argue, defines groups in totemic ways. Flaps
draw categorical distinctions between those who eat cheap meat (Pacific Islanders) and those
who do not (everyone else). To be sure, such distinctions align with geopolitical and
socioeconomic inequalities – inequalities that Pacific Islanders embody in a slew of ‘lifestyle
diseases’, namely obesity. Careful not to equate obesity merely with flap consumption,
however, Gewertz and Errington situate flaps within broader dietary habits. Pacific Islanders
today not only eat cheap meat, but also energy-rich industrial foods like Twisties, a Pepsi Co.
corn and rice product that is meant as a snack but more often than not taken as a meal. The
global commodity chains reaching these island nations thus distribute a new set of risks
alongside new kinds of ‘food’.
What’s more, this Islanders’ fleshy form of animal incorporation determines the contours
not just of individual bodies, but of social and national bodies, too. At stake in this story are
the transnational inequalities and circumscribed choices that deem cheap (valueless) flaps
‘good enough’ for Pacific Islanders, and the repeated disappointments of development that
prompt many islanders and their governments to agree. Like the experimental scientists who
tack back and forth between viewing animals as kindred subjects and research objects, the
proximities and distances drawn between social groups and meat flaps entail moral
calculations that render unequal categories of life and uneven patterns of vulnerability.

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I am particularly interested in Gewertz and Errington’s assertion that a market rhetoric of
supply and demand cannot silence the politically charged movements of fatty meat. It is
disingenuous to speak of consumption ‘choices’ in places characterized by limited markets
and social mobility. The Fijian ban on flap dumping illustrates one government’s efforts to
safeguard the health of its citizens in the face of powerful economic interests. But the fact
that this ban remains contested, and the fact that no other Pacific Island nations have
followed suit, suggest that the market value of fatty flesh may trump other valuations of
human bodies and welfare.
Ambivalence and discomfort. The feelings that accompany my own interspecies interactions
surface prominently in these distinct ethnographic arenas. This is not surprising, for as
Donna Haraway (2008) shows, interspecies co-minglings always cause some indigestion.
These texts remind us, as scholars and people in the world, to engage with apparent
ambivalences, to explore those that may be silenced, and to probe their implications. In this
way we might move past tendencies to frame animal incorporations in terms of choice,
restrictions, or even ethics, and to seek out more flexible and site-specific ways of dealing
with discomfort.
About the author
Natalie Porter is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame,
where she researches the social and political aspects of pandemic disease management in
Vietnam and the United States. Articles related to this work have been published in American
Ethnologist, BioSocieties, and Public Culture. Natalie is currently writing a book-length
ethnography on bird flu control in Vietnamese poultry economies.
References
Gewertz, Deborah B., and Frederick Karl Errington. 2010. Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in
the Pacific Islands. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sharp, Leslie. 2014. The Transplant Imaginary: Mechanical Hearts, Animal Parts, and Moral
Thinking in Highly Experimental Science. Berkeley: University of California Press.