Encounters, Trajectories, and the Ethnographic Moment: Why “Asia as Method” Still Matters

In the first place, it is a difficult question if one can distinguish invasion and solidarity in a concrete situation.

Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Nihon no Ajia-shugi” (“Japanese Asianism”)

1 Context and Contextualization

In “Provincializing STS: Postcoloniality, Symmetry, and Method” in this issue, John Law and Lin Wen-yuan forcefully argue for what they call “a third postcolonial version of the principle of symmetry” (214). This insistence is firmly rooted in their ethnographic encounters with practices of Taiwanese STS and Chinese medicine. In these encounters, Law and Lin put their own analytical practice in a symmetrical relation with their interlocutor’s Chinese medical practice, such that not only does STS provide insight into Chinese medical practice but also the latter informs an alternative mode of STS.

Their complex mode of contextualization is striking. Anthropologists often see context as a set of connections between the object in focus and its surroundings. Because context plays a significant role in giving meaning to the object, contextualization, in the sense of providing a new set of connections, transforms the object’s meaning. Such transformation is usually part of what it means to do anthropological analysis. Context, that is, makes sense of a phenomenon that at first glance looks strange (Dilley 1999; Strathern 1987).

Law and Lin’s exploration is no exception. They start with a perplexing moment in a STS workshop in Hsinchu, which gave rise to “disconcertment” (Verran 2001) taking the form of an uncomfortable recognition of self-contradiction. They write, “STS was telling Law that what we know is situated, but he was talking to a Taiwanese audience as if the need for a messy method was a decontextualized truth” (215).

The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1999) calls this kind of disconcerting encounter the “ethnographic moment”—when the ethnographer’s conceptual frame and an odd situation bump into each other. For Law and Lin, this disconcertment even involved an embodied affect of the disunity of self. They write, “We are immersed in two different worlds: common sense in Hsinchu is often unlike common sense in Lancaster. Indeed, Lin sometimes feels that his head and his body are in different places, as if he has been intellectually beheaded” (215). Strathern (1999) argues that the ethnographic moment is also an anticipatory moment. The perplexity of the encounter invites the ethnographer to further explore context to make sense of it. In this moment, perplexity becomes a harbinger of a new understanding, potentially brought about by future contextualization.

Responding to this situation, Law and Lin employed two strategies. First, they locate the disconcertment experienced in Hsinchu in the more encompassing context of “postcolonial intellectual asymmetries” (213). This makes sense of the disconcertment by putting it in a larger context. In turn, this led them to formulate the cause of the disconcertment as largely stemming from the uneven global network of higher education, which centers on the United States and the United Kingdom. This asymmetry often takes the form of the division of labor between theory and case studies. Thus, Law and Lin argue that in STS “we have case studies, Euro-American and Southern on the one hand and theory on the other. But the latter, together with the theory–case study division itself—comes from Euro-America” (213).

However, Law and Lin quickly shift to another strategy. In doing so, they aim to make an intervention that destabilizes the theory–case studies divide by drawing on a rather unconventional use of context. Here, they turn to another ethnographic moment in Dr. Lee’s counseling room, where they encountered the coexistence of seemingly incommensurable forms of knowledge. In engaging with Lee’s practice, they let her heterogeneous practice inflect STS theory rather than explaining it by this theory. In other words, they put their own analytical practice and Lee’s Chinese medical practice in a symmetrical relation in which each becomes a context for the other. Chinese medicine “inflects” STS theory by becoming its context.

This attempt seems to share central features with lateral analysis, which is emerging at the interface between anthropology and STS (Gad and Jensen 2016). While...