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).
