STS, TCM, and Other Shi 勢 (Situated Dispositions of Power/Knowledge)

Reading John Law and Wen-yuan Lin’s “Provincializing STS,” I can only suppose that I am expected to engage with it as a cultural anthropologist who has studied the social life of traditional Chinese medicine in China. Certainly, I am interested in how these authors, both outsiders (like me) to the technicalities of Chinese medicine, have found resources for thinking about the global sciences through experiencing clinical practice in Taiwan. But before engaging with the lives and truths of a non-Western medical system as Law and Lin present it, I want to take up a more fundamental challenge their article presents.

The authors argue that we—historians and sociologists of scientific knowledge and practice, writing mostly in English—push beyond the principle of symmetry in the work of science and technology studies. “Symmetry between true knowledge claims and those that were false,” they note, “was crucial to [our earlier colleagues in] the sociology of scientific knowledge” (213). Further, an even-handed extension of agency and efficacy to nonhuman realms has also been important to theory, far beyond STS. Actor-network theory with its distributed agency has led some social thought away from epistemological and cognitive abstractions to encourage a return to history and ethnography. In this turn to the concrete and the particular, the authors display a certain agnosticism about theory and universals. More important, they implicitly historicize a theory-practice or theory-case divide in our methodological assumptions. One outcome of a more serious engagement with other rationalities might be a revived vision of hybrid praxis for a hegemonic Western academy. Though we want more than just “theory from the South” (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2012), we still don’t know the contours of the symmetries we seek in a truly postcolonial STS.

The universalist imaginary of all sciences, including the human sciences—the “one-world world,” as Law (2015) has called it—has been made to look provincial well before this moment, especially at the hands of science studies. But Law and Lin in their essay have a polemical point to make against any complacency the field might fall into. They would have our theory relativize even the terms of analysis. There might, in other words, be multiple and incommensurate languages in the analytical toolbox of the human sciences. The notion of provincializing theory expands our usually taken-for-granted procedures and makes method a self-conscious political project.

Let’s go back to symmetry. As a methodological principle, symmetry is not new; in anthropology it even predates the social studies of knowledge writings of a few decades ago. But symmetrical explanation has not been easy to explicate in our teaching or to practice in our scholarship. Students and other novices to epistemology think of symmetry as a kind of facile relativism—to be fair, they seem to hear us say, every belief must be deemed equally true. Because we historicize the sciences and look beyond our campuses for knowledge, they think we are saying that everyone is entitled to their opinion, and all we require to move forward globally is tolerance of others’ ideas and cultures. The implication is that truth really doesn’t matter that much, I guess, except to scientists. Bruno Latour has written about this: he and all manner of constructivists hear the “do you believe in reality?” question a lot, and in the end there is little we can do besides throw up our hands in frustration. Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s critique of objectivism in epistemology, Contingencies of Value (1988), locates the problem exactly where it belongs. Our modernist commitment to objective positive knowledge, to truth as the correct representation of reality, is a value, assembled from all manner of contingent choices colored by class, gender, and other local interests. And any sympathetic approach to alternative knowledge, any pluralizing of “the” truth, is treated by many as a kind of a crime against nature; certainly it is a crime against the universalist scientific habitus we cultivate in our teaching.

Speaking of Smith, it was she who reminded me most clearly that symmetry in explanation is...