Suspending Belief: Epoché in Animal Behavior Science. Issue 3 (20th August 2013)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Candea, Matei
• Is Part Of: American anthropologist. Volume 115:Issue 3(2013)
• Page Start: 423
• Page End: 436
• Publication Date: 2013-08-20
• Subjects: Anthropology -- Periodicals; Electronic journals; 301.05
• DOI: 10.1111/aman.12026
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0002-7294

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="main" xml:lang="en"> <title>ABSTRACT</title> <p>In an anthropology that has turned, in recent years, toward the study of human–animal relations, scientific skepticism about nonhuman animal minds has more often been featured as a focus of conceptual critique than of ethnographic exegesis. Decried as the sign of a problematic detachment from nonhumans, such skepticism is often simultaneously presented as an ideological stance by which no one who actually works and lives with nonhuman animals could truly live. In contrast, in this article, I examine attempts to live by such skepticism through an ethnography of two very different British‐led research projects in which scientists study animal behavior and cognition respectively. I describe researchers' commitment to engaging in intersubjective relations with the nonhuman animals they study while simultaneously detaching from propositional beliefs about the latter's inner lives. This simultaneously engaged and detached attitude, which I describe as "epoché, " challenges descriptions of a settled "naturalist" ontology at play in animal behavior science and offers the potential for a comparative anthropology of doubt and operational skepticism.</p> </abstract>