Social Theory, East Asia, Science Studies

Social Theory, East Asia, Science Studies John Lie Received: 15 September 2008 /Accepted: 15 September 2008 / Published online: 20 January 2009 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2009 When I tried to buy a bottle of white flower oil (baihuayou) recently at a Taipei pharmacy, I was given a box of Viagra instead. Noticing my grimace, the old man behind the counter thrust a pencil and a paper at me, and I dutifully wrote down the Chinese characters. I got the white flower oil. Such a small incident may illustrate only my inadequate command of Mandarin, or my apparent diminution of vigor, but what interests me more is the resolution of miscommunication. This interaction surely has been replayed endlessly in East Asia over the past millennia. Yet, it is symptomatic of the times that a Taipei pharmacist should hear an Anglophone word when a Chinese one is spoken. Why not? Just as billboards carrying Englishlanguage brands and catchphrases dot the Taipei skylines, so are East Asian scholarly journals published in English. Perhaps more noteworthy for the present context is that the quintessentially “western” phenomena of science and technology should require concentrated scholarly attention by East Asian scholars largely located in East Asia and that their primary intellectual tools should be the “western” theories of Science and Technology Studies (STS).1 I teach “western” social theory at a US university, but I also assume another role as an administrator of “area studies.” The two functions strike many of my colleagues as paradoxical, even contradictory: on the one hand, I am teaching supposedly universal, abstract knowledge; on the other, promoting particular, concrete knowledge. Moreover, whereas social theory retains some intellectual prestige, “area studies” is often regarded suspiciously and at times even as a term of opprobrium. I find the dual interest neither paradoxical nor contradictory. Only by dialectically transcending the limitations of the two fields can we strive for a more satisfactory social science: “global studies” that offers global knowledge, or the knowledge of the present. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2008) 2:445–448 DOI 10.1007/s12280-008-9060-7 1 See Daiwie Fu’s invocation of Bruno Latour et al. in the inaugural issue of EASTS. J. Lie (*) University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: johnlie@berkeley.edu A congenital flaw of social theory, in spite of its universalist aspirations, is its parochialism.2 Born in eighteenth-century Europe, it bears the stigma of its social origins. The expanding infrastructural power of the state—from national systems of education and military to national circuits of transportation and communication— produced cultural and national integration. Previously distinct peoples came to share the same languages, beliefs, and cultures. At the same time, the democratic revolution—and the attendant decline in status hierarchy—achieved some degree of status integration. No longer did people of distinct status groups regard themselves as different peoples: transnational aristocrats and local peasants alike became fellow nationals. The coherence of the nation-state persuaded proto-social scientists to regard it as the fundamental and privileged unit of description and explanation. In so doing, they almost inevitably ignored or occluded both supranational and subnational forces and relations. The commonsense equation of “nation” and “society” systematically downplayed transnational and local connections and differences. More problematically, the society that formed the basis for social theory was inevitably a European one, usually England. With the partial exception of Max Weber, what eminent social theorist employed a non-European case? For Smith, Marx, and Polanyi, England was the privileged location upon which their intellectual edifice was built. Confronted with undeniable differences in capitalist industrialization and political development, especially in non-European areas, the great theorists rationalized their substitution of the particular for the universal by way of evolutionary metaphors. The use of a single case was justified by asserting that out of diversity will emerge convergence: De te fabula narratur! insisted Marx. Particular concrete cases inevitably shouldered the burden of universal validity. Hic Rhodus, hic salta: we remember only the insights and not the blindness. The fundamental flaw of overgeneralization becomes obvious should any scholar strive to develop a general theory based on a non-European case. It perforce would not...