Catch and Release. Lisa Jean Moore
the social world. For example, establishing categories for sexual identity for an interview questionnaire required lengthy in-class debates about the formation and rejection of certain static, singular categories or statuses—endless debates about “What is a lesbian? What is bisexual?” The solution was “self-identification,” a sort of work-around to avoid a priori categories. Yet still, when conducting the interview, the informant was asked, “What is your sexual orientation?” And when writing up the analysis of the data, informants were neatly placed in categories as if they were self-evident and transparent—measurable, real, and singular. In other words, the category of “lesbian” always became reified or real in the process of trying to make it emergent through informants’ own words.
Over the last several years, my work has shifted toward a decidedly posthumanist frame where I feel the work resonates with the intellectual project of new materialism that considers all matter (human and nonhuman, objects, nature, technologies) as having agency or the ability or potential to make action happen. The move from humanism and speciesism means that relationality is not just between human beings but between humans and animals or between horseshoe crabs with one another, the sand, the sun, the tides. In particular, I frame this book as part of the new materialist writings exemplified by the work of feminist scholars such as Karen Barad, Mel Chen, and Jane Bennett.17 These scholars’ work demonstrates the active participation of the nonhuman and human, the animate and inanimate in social life and social order. Posthumanism de-centers the human being as the foundation of all ontological inquiry, challenges the self-anointed autonomy of the human species as rational selves, and seeks to construct a multifaceted idea of what it means to become human. Feminist new materialism, a form of posthumanism, engages with the relationship of matter to social and cultural interpretations. Matter is commonly understood as something distinct from our thoughts and sacred meanings; it is commonly defined as something that occupies space and has mass. Theorists in this area explore the ontology, or essence of being, of matter as deeply consequential for how the world comes to be known and enacted.
Horseshoe crabs and I are entangled in a world of becoming; as we intraact, we make each other up. As Catch and Release argues, human and horseshoe crab bodies materialize based on our interdependent relationships—polluting resources, generating commerce, exploiting medical capacities. We are enmeshed in heterogeneous worlds of the local, urban, global, ecologic, and geologic. In my earlier book, Buzz, Mary Kosut and I discuss how honeybees and humans are entangled in a world of pesticides, global food production, urban renewal, and species disintegration.18 The human/honeybee nexus also reveals our entanglement in a toxified world of interdependence. The cultural theorist Cary Wolfe, borrowing from Haraway’s cyborgs, argues that we have become fundamentally “prosthetic creatures” with an ontology that has “coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is.”19 For example, I come to matter in collaboration with the honeybees that pollinated my food and worked to shape the industrial food supply. And even if I had never apprehended a horseshoe crab, they have fertilized the land before me and changed biomedical production, just as I have circumscribed the bees and crabs lives and bodies through my enactments of being human and using resources.
The animal familiars, including horseshoe crabs, who make us what we are, companion species who have helped stabilize our bodies, and our selves, remain entangled in complex multispecies worlds.20 For those of us whose health is fostered by government and corporate apparatuses, we exist in our current form as human because horseshoe crab blood has deemed our biomedicalization safe. Quite literally, our inoculated, pharmacologically enhanced, vaccinated bodies exist in their current status through a collaborated becoming with horseshoe crabs.
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss is often paraphrased as stating that “animals are good to think with.” Here he means that human’s interpretations of animals can offer very fruitful structures and frameworks for generating concepts and establishing larger connections between ways of thinking. Humans use animals to think with when we create metaphors and similes—“she’s as busy as a bee,” or “he’s as brave as a lion”—or when we manufacture sports mascots. More specifically, academics use animals to think with as a means of understanding sociality. In my own collaborative work with bees and even in some ways with my research on sperm, I have used these nonhuman entities to reveal meta-level analysis about contemporary masculinity and types of endangerment.21
Social theorists are not the only ones, or the first, to see the wisdom in deep engagement with animals. While attending the celebration of the work of the 96-year-old Carl N. Shuster, Jr., the world’s leading authority on North Atlantic horseshoe crabs, in June 2016, I was struck by his captivating combination of philosophical, naturalist, and artistic sensibilities while speaking about horseshoe crabs. “You want to know what’s going on with the crab, you ask it. Heck, you want to know what’s going on with the ocean, you ask a crab, too. You have to get down there with them, and just watch them and for a long time. Over a long time, you will start to know things.”22
Horseshoe crabs are good to think with. In Catch and Release I make many connections among our contemporary biomedical, geopolitical, and ecological environments while also pushing my analysis and method to show we must move beyond seeing the bee, or the sperm cell, or in this case, the horseshoe crab as merely a lens that reflects and refracts human life. Rather I argue that, not only are the crabs among us, but they are also in us (through their blood), and they are in many ways becoming us as we are becoming them. I rely on meditations on my methodological choices and fieldwork notes to illustrate this enmeshment. From both a scholarly and personal position, I muse about the ways our fates are in some ways deeply entangled, and yet the crabs reveal deep human vulnerabilities—to toxins, the climate, the ocean, and time.
Human Exploitation of Crabs
Catch and Release investigates and grapples with these questions: How do humans exploit the crabs, come to depend on them, and fret about their welfare? How is it that humans are simultaneously saviors and villains in stories about the crabs? Have the crabs met their match in humans after 480 million years, or are humans, in their speciesist ignorance, insignificant to the crabs’ geologic legacy?
As a qualitative sociologist, my method of investigating these questions is to be with the crabs and the people who work with them. In the summer of 2015, I attended the Third International Workshop on the Conservation of the Horseshoe Crab in Sasebo, Japan. I share my field notes from the first day:
Fighting my bleary-eyed jet lag and fitful sleep on a tatami mat, I finger through my registration packet for the Third International Workshop on the Science and Conservation of the Horseshoe Crab. I am sitting on a generic conference chair in a hotel ballroom in Sasebo, Japan, scoping out the fellow humans. Attending mostly sociology and gender studies academic meetings in my professional life, where colleagues routinely complain about the lack of heterogeneous representation, it is interesting to see such a diverse audience of humans. I’m not sure there is any one dominant ethnic group in this crowd of natural scientists, conservationists, ecologists, and wildlife educators. I smile at the man next to me, looking down at his name tag—Jaime Zaldívar-Rae, Anahuac Mayab University, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. He nods to the stage, as opening remarks are just beginning. A slightly hunched Japanese man in a loose-fitting suit is helped up the steps.
The 87-year-old Mr. Keiji Tsuchiya is a former middle school teacher who dedicated his life, in part, to horseshoe crab conservation. He is a founding member of the Nippon Kabutogani wo Mamoru Kai (Japanese Society for the Preservation of the Horseshoe Crab). During his presentation, Mr. Tsuchiya speaks about the origin of his “love” for horseshoe crabs. As a 17-year-old drafted soldier, working off the shore of Hiroshima, he recounts through a female translator, “I saw a flash, heard loud sounds, and saw a mushroom cloud, and then all the sudden it was very dark and I could only smell burning.” Once he arrived on the shoreline, Tsuchiya navigated through the burning structures to help line up victims side by side and vividly recalls the cries of “Give me water, sir.” Pausing dramatically to choke back tears, Tsuchiya shares, “I can still hear the words of victims in their last moments begging for water.”
After the recovery efforts, he continued his career training to be a middle school teacher.
Then