The Stickiness of Knowing: Translation, Postcoloniality, and STS

A language, a culture, or a thought, in its divergence, furnishes other engagements with (another glimpse of) the unthought. And its fecundity is measured by the power of this engagement and this glimpse.

François Jullien, On the Universal

1 Opening Comments

“Provincializing STS” is one essay in a short continuing line of practical intellectual experiments that seek to explore the character of a possible Chinese-inflected STS.¹ These experiments are partial, location specific, and incomplete, and they necessarily fit more or less poorly within standard disciplinary boundaries. They also raise serious problems with terminology and level of analysis (“Chinese”? “Western”?). Unsurprisingly, reactions have been varied: sometimes well received, they also have been seen as wrong-headed, unscholarly, dangerous, mystifying, offensive, weird, or simply uninteresting. We are therefore deeply grateful to Warwick Anderson, Ruey-Lin Chen, Judith Farquhar, Atsuro Morita, and the editors of EASTS for their attention to the issues we are seeking to raise, their generosity of their comments, and their willingness to continue to think collaboratively about the possibilities implied by “Asian,” “postcolonial,” “Chinese,” and/or “Taiwanese” forms of STS. We also are grateful that they let us down gently when we go astray. Anderson correctly implies that the essay is not well located in important parts of postcolonial literature. Chen appropriately warns that Western STS authors should not be encouraged, even implicitly, to ignore the work of their Asian colleagues. Farquhar is right to note the limits to our knowledge of the rich history and contemporary practices of Chinese medicine. And Morita is generous in choosing to treat the tensions between the ethnographic moment of disconcertment and the so-called postcolonial intellectual asymmetry as an occasion for a further and illuminating experiment of his own.

In effect, all four commentators are gently reminding us that the topics we explore are much more complex than the manner in which we open them up. So we are rightly reminded that histories (including academic histories) are different in the different East Asian countries; that the term Chinese is an endlessly ambiguous marker; that the Chinese language is heterogeneous; that Chinese medicine indeed comes in many different forms; that the dualist divisions “West”–“East Asia” are misleading in many ways, but not least because there is a long and continuing history of complex power-saturated interchanges between the West and East Asia; that “the West” itself is scarcely a homogeneous category; that Taiwanese daily experience is not always so unlike that of Europe or North America; that the issue of temporalities, a crucial feature of postcolonial encounters, is in urgent need of exploration; and that in STS, the division between theory and case study is not simply problematic but also has been extensively problematized. Some of these complexities are foregrounded in “Provincializing STS.” For instance, we worry about the difficulty of using such terms as Chinese or Western and the extreme difficulty of avoiding terms such as these that are aggregating and polarizing. However, if we discuss some of the complexities raised by the commentators, more often we set these to one side, sometimes explicitly but sometimes not.

To say this is not to deny that there also are disagreements. Most obvious, the way in which we imagine STS differs from the vision offered by Chen on, for instance, the issue of language and translation. Far less than Chen do we take it that words and theories or theory versions can be detached from the practices in which they are embedded and moved elsewhere. We share his view that concepts are unlikely to be “national”—this is one of the larger terms that we have indeed sought to avoid.² However, our approach to STS assumes that words are embedded within, grow out of, and participate in practices. In our work we therefore usually seek to grasp the character of those practices.³ This way of thinking suggests that terms unavoidably carry their own only partially negotiable social and intellectual baggage—that they are, in other words, more or less context sticky. If this is right, then a whole series...