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East Asian STS: Fox or Hedgehog?
- East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal
- Duke University Press
- Volume 1, Number 2, 2007
- pp. 243-247
- Article
- Additional Information
East Asian STS: Fox or Hedgehog? Fa-ti Fan Received: 5 August 2007 /Accepted: 8 December 2007 / Published online: 31 January 2008 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2008 In his position paper for the EASTS, Professor Fu raises a series of issues that help define the mission and outlook of the journal. They may be summarized in question form as follows: (1) Is East Asia a useful category for science and technology studies? (2) Is East Asia STS simply the application of existing theories from the United States or Europe to East Asia? Is its aim simply to produce case studies modeled on Western scholarship? How can East Asian STS be fruitfully distinctive from what is being practiced in the West today? And (3) how can we best put East Asian STS into social practice? I agree with much of what Fu has to say on these questions. I certainly share his belief that East Asian STS can make significant contributions to science and technology studies in general. As laid out in Fu’s paper, however, East Asian STS seems a little too circumscribed and limiting; it leaves out many interesting possibilities and opportunities . Put facetiously, I’ve imagined East Asian STS to be a fox, but what comes out of Fu’s paper looks rather like a hedgehog. Let me explain why. 1 Fu reflects on recent theories concerning the relationship between “the West and the rest.” Anthropology, postcolonial studies, and allied disciplines have questioned area studies and such categories as center/periphery and metropole/colony. They have proposed and emphasized another set of concepts, such as networks, traffic, and circulation. Fu sees a problem here. If one followed this trend of thinking far enough, wouldn’t one have to give up the category of East Asia all together? One would instead focus on the traffic of ideas, the circulation of cultural productions, the networks of social relations, etc. on the local and the global level. But Fu also wants to maintain the usefulness of East Asia as an analytical category: Why else would we need a journal on East Asian STS at all? East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2007) 1:243–247 DOI 10.1007/s12280-007-9019-0 F. Fan (*) The State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, P.O. Box 6000, NY 13902, USA e-mail: ffan@binghamton.edu To justify his position, Fu refers to two historical conditions. One is the shared historical experience of the countries in the region. The other is the geopolitical condition of power relations. According to Fu, if one goes too far in emphasizing the phenomena of traffic, networks, and circulation, one is at the risk of forgetting the reality of domination, dependency, and even center/periphery. In this historical matrix, then, one can mark out East Asia as a particular geographic and historical region for STS research. I am sympathetic to Fu’s position and perspective. I think that he raises an important issue that all of us have to think seriously about. However, I would like to complicate the issue a little bit. First, I am not sure that I can agree with the theoretical conundrum Fu sets up in his paper. The main thrust of postcolonial studies and other related approaches he discusses is to avoid essentializing the center/periphery, metropole/colony, and other such categories. They try to develop conceptual frameworks that treat historical actors in a symmetrical way— symmetrical not in the sense that they were equally powerful, but in the sense that they can be analyzed in the same methodological terms. These approaches do not deny the reality of power differentials. There were of course domination and resistance (as well as appropriation, submission, complicity, and translation, all of which deserve study), but all power relations had to play out in local contingencies. We cannot simply accept the center/periphery as conventionally defined and assume that their relationship was stable. The dominant struggled to maintain the existing order of power relations, but the order could be disrupted or subverted or reversed in particular contexts. It is our job to document and explain such changes. Second, is the area drawn by Japanese...