This Way Does Not Come to the Point: Comments on “Provincializing STS: Postcoloniality, Symmetry, and Method”

John Law and Wen-yuan Lin’s “Provincializing STS: Postcoloniality, Symmetry, and Method” in this issue is an ambitious article, proposing a new postcolonial approach to STS studies. Law and Lin attempt to extend the principle of symmetry to non-Western and Western. They argue that the analytical-institutional complex in STS scholarship has produced postcolonial intellectual asymmetries. A crucial asymmetry, they believe, is that Euro-American STS produces theories and that non-Euro-American STS does case studies. They suggest that this asymmetry might be redressed if we carry out postcolonial investigations using non-Western analytical resources.

To present the problem and their arguments substantively, Law and Lin take Taiwan’s situation as an example. They start with an interesting dialogue that happened in Taiwan in 2009. That year, Law was first invited to visit Taiwan and gave a seminar in which he and Lin encountered rather disconcerting experiences that resulted from the collision of two different metaphysical worlds. Hsin-Hsing Chen, a Taiwanese STS scholar, talked of his experiences at a festival for the goddess Mazu. His experiences clashed with Law’s Euro-American theory, built as it was on a Western metaphysical system quite different from the Chinese metaphysical system of Taiwan. Lin rather felt as if shenshouyichu 身首異處—“his head and his body are in different places.” (215) Lin, as a Western-trained STS scholar and a Chinese-speaking Taiwanese, felt “that his head is full of Euro-American theory and knowledge while his body inhabits Taiwan” (215). Law and Lin believe that this kind of situation is not peculiar to Taiwanese STS. They suggest that any postcolonial STS needs to attend to these kinds of issues, “not just in Taiwan or China but, for instance, in the Spanish-, Portuguese-, or Hindi-speaking worlds” (216).

In addition to the metaphysical differences, the institutional contexts also matter. Most STS scholars and social scientists in Taiwan were trained in Euro-American universities; they tend to accept Euro-American—and even solely English-language—standards for academic (publication) evaluation and university ranking. These institutional devices urge them to reproduce the model of learning and scholarship found in Euro-America and, more particularly, North America. Although some academics in Taiwan, as Law and Lin point out, have performed a long-term reflection on academic recolonization, the situation in Taiwan largely remains unchanged. Worse, these institutional realities strengthen the dichotomy of theory and case study, the separation of mind from body, and the asymmetry of Euro-American (English-speaking) and Taiwanese (Chinese-speaking) postcolonial STS.

Given such a diagnosis of Taiwan’s situation in particular, Law and Lin’s prescription is to encourage STS scholars to do Chinese-inflected STS. They illustrate this with the practice of Dr. Lee, a distinguished Chinese medical practitioner. Lee diagnoses patients by combining Chinese medical concepts such as xuhuo 虛火 (depleted fire) and chi 尺 (a pulse-taking point) with Western biomedical tests. Law and Lin believe that the mode of Lee’s work indicates a new postcolonial approach to STS studies, which is different from the approach taken by other sinologists and medical anthropologists such as Mario Blaser, Judith Farquhar, and Mei Zhan, who use a set of English-language concepts such as syncretic, patterns of association, propensities, and the like to interpret Chinese medicine. They “use STS language to articulate Chinese medicine for a Euro-American readership” (219). However, Law and Lin suggest that we should think symmetrically, that is, do Chinese-inflected STS. In doing so, we should ask such questions as what goes with what and whether what it is observing is in balance or not, rather than looking for a strong explanation. Such Chinese-inflected STS “has to do with hybridity, the refusal to embrace reductionist forms of explanation, and the assumption that objects are relational, not given” (220). Furthermore, it should be used to deal with cases not only in Taiwan or China but also in Euro-America. To advance their approach, Law and Lin have used a Chinese term—shi (勢, “propensities”)—to make sense of a European case...