Introduction

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.

Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition

The 2012 issue of Osiris, the journal of the History of Science Society, critically examined a discipline in crisis, beset by what the editors diagnosed as a malaise of abundance and diversity that has been caused by the out-of-control growth and multiplication of objects of study. If once we spoke of science in the singular, they observe, historians today turn their attention to multiple sciences spread across the globe, existing during all historical periods and extending from the practices of everyday life to quantum physics. Science, furthermore, is rarely imagined today as clearly demarcated from technology or, for that matter, medicine. In response, some contributors to the Osiris volume argued for a return to more clearly defined disciplinary boundaries, while others showed that disciplinary boundaries and concerns are reflective of larger social and political trends and thus not easily manipulated by individual actors or professional groups.

Asimilar diagnosis could be applied to the field of science studies, too. What started out as the sociology of scientific knowledge and then became science and technology studies has now morphed into the larger field of social—or even cultural—studies of science, technology, and medicine. Hence, while some of the leading thinkers in the discipline continue to follow the discipline's ancestors in demarcating science from other fields of social activity even as they ground it in social practice and object-oriented practices,¹ others challenge the existence of clearly defined boundaries between science and whatever we might wish to constitute as its real or imagined other² or even look toward such other traditions of thoughtful practice for inspiration in rethinking science studies itself (Zhan 2012).

The articles we have collected in this special issue of EASTS are written against the background of these debates, to which, in turn, they also seek to contribute. They do so, however, not by means of direct engagement at the level of theory but obliquely through a series of case studies focused on the field of Asian medicines. Asian medicines are well suited to such an endeavor for a number of reasons. Consistently labeled as "traditional," "ethnic," and "pseudo-scientific" by those who would like to root science firmly in the West, practitioners and proponents of Asian medicines have long been forced to take up their own positions vis-à-vis science and biomedicine and define their practices accordingly. Following these struggles through time and across different locations, in turn, has provided researchers across the medical humanities with valuable field sites for exploring the nature of science, medicine, and the modern.

In our own previous work, we have taken up this challenge on a number of different fronts, not least in our investigation of Asian medicines as living traditions. Our argument, in brief, is that historical accounts that seek to distinguish sciences from traditions on account of the former's forward orientation and built-in drive toward ongoing reconstitution and refashioning are fundamentally problematic. This is because traditions, at least those that are "living," are characterized by many of the same qualities those authors see as demarcating science. We defined such living traditions as "sites of contestation" where anything that composes and defines that tradition, so to speak, is always and forever up for grabs. This includes knowledge claims, practices, phenomena engaged with, institutions, entitlements, self-definitions, social relationships, and much more. And yet, such living traditions consistently manage to maintain a sense of identity that emphasizes continuity over time. They succeed in doing so because the processes of transformation that reshape them tend to proceed in piecemeal rather than revolutionary fashion. That is, some things change while others remain the same. Hence, even if after a while everything has changed, social actors at any given moment in time can, if they so wish, experience a sense of continuity with respect to whatever it is they are engaged in. It is this perception...