A Kitchen Named “East Asian STS” (a.k.a. “Editing, Cooking, and Transforming,” Part 2)

Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826), politician and gastronome

Let me first remind readers of Professor Chia-Ling Wu’s farewell remarks in our previous issue (10, no. 3); they end with a touching sentence: “If we are what we eat, I hope EASTS has nourished us and even transformed how we understand East Asia, as well as science and technology.” But that’s not why I’ve placed this well-known quotation at the beginning of this article. For those of you who watched Iron Chef (Ryori no tetsujin, 料理の鉄人), that famous cooking show in the 1990s, this phrase might conjure up happy memories of times when, on Friday or Sunday nights, people enjoyed nothing but food in all its glory. In the “Kitchen Stadium,” where not just chefs but also critics and commentators were invited by the host, Chairman Kaga, these “food fanatics” were pushing the boundaries of knowing what we are through food—cooking, eating, commenting, sharing.

Looking back over the first decade of EASTS’s history, I think Professor Wu’s cooking and sharing metaphor is truly appropriate for this East Asia–based journal. EASTS started with a metaphor of travel, offered up in the title of Professor Daiwie Fu’s position paper “How Far Can East Asian STS Go?” (1, no. 1: 1–14). As its journey to establish “a distinctive EASTS study” proceeded, EASTS became engaged with outstanding scholars both in and outside of East Asia proper. As nicely summarized in Professor Fu’s farewell note, “Past and Future,” in 2012 (6, no. 4: 437–39), some of the work has been on universal STS themes, paying particular interest to local problems and guided by different disciplinary threads, while some scholars, in East Asia after finishing their academic training in prestigious STS programs in the United States or Europe, have looked for intellectual connections between the global and the local. The travel metaphor still works, but keen readers will be amazed by the breadth of the intellectual landscape of STS about East Asia that has been explored by EASTS; EASTS has gone far and deep in appreciating its beauty and complexity.

Here, then, is where a culinary metaphor is called for. Echoing Professor Wu’s chopsticks and rice cooker image, I can’t help but bring up Iron Chef again. Aiming to “realize a dream in a form never seen before,” EASTS, just like the show, welcomes authors—or “intellectual chefs”—from around the world to demonstrate their scholarship on specific themes or topics. On the other side stands the editorial team, the “Iron Chefs” who specialize in different genres of cuisine. EASTS has benefitted from having so many renowned scholars serving on our editorial board, in particular as associate editors. We are delighted that the sociologist Hee Je Bak and the historians Francesca Bray and Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, who were originally our editors, are joining the anthropologist Michael Fischer and the historian of science Togo Tsukahara to serve as our associate editors for the next three years.

On Iron Chef, the invited chefs would challenge the resident chefs in the Gourmet Academy, but what made the show so exciting was not who beat whom at the end but the competitive process whereby such creative ways of treating food were featured. In its first six years, EASTS published sixteen special issues; under Professor Wu’s editorship it added eight more. These issues, like the featured foods and ingredients on Iron Chef, constitute the backbone of this journal.

Even so, EASTS does not limit itself to being a journal for “Asian fusion” STS. In fact, since this journal’s beginning we have continued to reflect on what STS is for East Asia and what East Asia means for STS through conferences, panels, and forums. If we review those issues published over the past three years, we see not just “local” themes such as Asian medicine being introduced but also theory-laden ones, such as traveling comparisons (7, no. 2) and making...