STS with East Asian Characteristics?

It remains difficult to describe the recent flourishing of STS in East Asia without ironic recourse to categories of actors, networks, and mobiles, whether immutable or mutable (Latour 1983, 1986; Star and Griesemer 1989). In particular, one can imagine Daiwie Fu, the founding editor of East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, as a go-getting Taiwanese Louis Pasteur, enrolling and marshalling various agents, actors, and actants in order to realize and to mobilize a distinctive package called "East Asian STS"—operating not unlike the figures inventing "Traditional Chinese Medicine" in the last century, entrepreneurs whom Sean Hsiang-lin Lei (2014) depicts so vividly. A brief perusal of the tables of contents and lists of advisory editors of the journal since its first issue in 2007 reveals many of the actors who were tempted into the enterprise. Togo Tsukahara (2019) and others have outlined several national, regional, and global networks comprising something like East Asian STS. And the question of the mutability of the STS "theory-methods package," as Adele E. Clarke and Leigh Star (2008) would have said, has incited much discussion in the pages of this journal from the moment of Fu's (2007) introductory provocation. From the beginning, then, EASTS has functioned, in postcolonial fashion, to demonstrate the changeability and pliancy of STS mobiles.

Indeed, it was the courageous challenge to the intellectual sovereignty and durability of standard Euro-American STS models of inquiry, this productive iconoclasm, that first attracted me to the project (see Anderson 2008, 2012, 2017). Of course, there have been times when, as the son of a Maoist, I found myself asking how profound our cognitive revolution really was, and wondering whether we risked substituting another form of sovereignty—another effort at purification, as Bruno Latour (1993) may put it—for the discarded dominance of the North Atlantic ancien régime. But on reflection, it seems to me now that the intellectual and cultural ecology of Taiwan early this century—the effects of histories of colonization and disputed sovereignty, acute sensitivity to settler-Indigenous relations, recent democratization, and its crucial location at a junction of multiple Asias and the Pacific—has ensured that the journal followed with vigor the hardest, irregular routes, rather than idle along a well-paved path. I am grateful to Wen-Hua Kuo for asking me to give more thought to this "founder effect," to trace a particular genealogy, one both critically postcolonial and boldly inclusive.

My enrollment in a specifically East Asian form of STS was slow and orphic, as such creeping commitments often are. During the 1990s, I had written extensively on colonial science and medicine in the Philippines, touching on regional connections and comparisons within Southeast Asia, but rarely venturing north of Hong Kong (see Anderson 2006). I think it must rather have been my fin-de-siècle advocacy of critical postcolonial studies of technoscience that first attracted the attention of Taiwanese STS scholars. Late in 2001, Shang-jen Li, whom I had met years before at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London, and Angela Ki-che Leung, then director of the Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at Academia Sinica, invited me to deliver some lectures in Taipei. Thus, in December 2002 I spent ten pleasant days in Taiwan talking about the history of leprosy in Southeast Asia and offering excerpts and excursions from my introduction to the special double issue of Social Studies of Science on "postcolonial technoscience," which Gabrielle Hecht and I were editing (Anderson 2002). More by chance than design, the topics proved pertinent. Leung was writing her book on leprosy in China and leading a large research project on semicolonial practices of hygiene in the region (Leung 2009, 2010). My additional reflections on the relations of postcolonial critique and the study of technoscience inadvertently happened to be equally apposite. I met Fu and Lei on this visit, and they explained how histories of colonization and disputed sovereignty were powerfully shaping emergent STS in Taiwan (and sometimes elsewhere in East Asia). Accordingly, it was exceptionally fertile ground for postcolonial critique. But as I...