Postcolonial Specters of STS

A few years ago, when the editors of East Asian Science, Technology and Society pressed me to give examples of what I meant by “Asia as method” in STS, I struggled to illustrate my argument (Anderson 2012). I could only repeat the somewhat evasive statement of Takeuchi Yashimi (2005 [1960]: 65): “It is impossible to state definitely what this may mean.” Like Taiwanese cultural studies scholar Chen Kuanhsing, I hoped, in his words, that “using Asia as an imaginary anchoring point can allow societies in Asia to become one another’s reference points” (2010: xv). Chen envisaged “Asia as method” multiplying “frames of reference in our subjectivity and worldview, so that anxiety over the West can be diluted, and productive critical work can move forward” (223). For me, this suggested a means to reorient STS—in particular, to refigure East Asia as a site of theory making in STS, not just a space for data extraction or a place to which European concepts diffused. I was postulating an Asia that is good to think with, and think from, in STS, rather than a fixed, hegemonic geographical region or essential civilizational entity. I saw this project—the assembling of a deliberately untidy cognitive platform on which to build a different STS—through a postcolonial lens, in the sense that

studies that contest European and North American hegemony in science, situating and thereby dismantling global or universal claims, represent what might be called the postcolonial turn. Recognition of creditable knowledge making beyond North Atlantic shores constitutes a postcolonial approach. So too does the emphasis on hybridity, heterogeneity, and indeterminacy in what once appeared to be sovereign, uncontaminated categories. A postcolonial orientation directs attention to the complexities of relations in any contact zone. It re-examines the terrain that empire has tilled across the world, showing that dominance is never absolute—that imperial or authoritative knowledge, despite colonial fantasy and amour propre, must always adapt to local conditions, mix with other traditions, and incorporate difference. In this sense, the argument that we have never truly been modern is implicitly postcolonial. Thus an analysis that deconstructs imperial binaries such as nature-culture, modern-traditional, global-local builds on a postcolonial, or decolonizing, platform.

(Anderson 2015b: 652; see also Anderson 2009)

In the 2012 essay on Asia as method, I primarily drew upon East Asian theorists, but the specifics of East Asian STS methodologies at the time remained elusive, or beyond my grasp at any rate. Thus I constructed a postcolonial framework for content that was exiguous at best. Imagine my surprise when John Law delivered the John D. Bernal lecture at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science. I learned then that Law and Lin Wen-yuan were giving form and function to Asia as method in STS (see their article in this issue).

Law and Lin are responding critically and constructively to a profusion of Asian case studies in STS that choose to deploy “global” or at least Euro-American theory. That is, they are reacting to the way Asian data are fed into an ostensibly “universal” North Atlantic conceptual apparatus. “STS might do well to explore a ... postcolonial version of the principle of symmetry,” they write (214, emphasis mine). This would mean “treating non-Western and [Euro-American] STS terms of analysis symmetrically” (ibid.). The appeal to symmetry is a nice touch, reminding readers of the heady early years of STS, only now giving the prescription a postcolonial twist. Even more appealing is their effort to show what such postcolonial analytic symmetry might look like in STS. Following Judith Farquhar (2015), Law and Lin sketch a Chinese explanatory sensibility in contemporary medical practice, revealing a curiously hybrid epistemological space. Then they take a Chinese “theory,” shi, and mobilize it as an analytic term, or method, to explain an English case, the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (see Law and Lin 2016). While these studies are still tentative and exploratory, they open up a passage that might get us around the impasse I encountered some years ago. In my view, their efforts represent a breakthrough.

“The white...