In the latest issue’s “Editor’s Note” of EASTS, Wen-hua Kuo made a call to East Asian science studies scholars to commit to an archeology of the social and technical infrastructure of epidemics. Coincidently, ten historians and sociologists working on science, technology, medicine, and environment with a focus on China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea had just begun a collective effort to understand how face masks had become the most important part of the current pandemic governance in East Asia. As its first step, a virtual workshop, “The Socio-Material History of Masked Societies in East Asia,” was held at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science on 26 October 2020. This forum aims to introduce the virtual meeting’s outcome to the wider EASTS community and encourages them to engage with the collaborative enterprise to investigate the history of masks. All papers focus on the socio-material dimension of masks while problematizing current culturalist explanatory narratives about “masked societies” in East Asia. By doing so, the papers show how mask use is closely linked to heterogenous but interconnected entanglements of environmental governance, political movements, and risk cultures in East Asian polities. It interrogates these relationships in the context of scientific controversies and quarantine regimes.
Keywords:
This forum is the outcome of a virtual workshop “The Socio-Material History of Masked Societies in East Asia” held at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (hereinafter MPIWG), Berlin, on 26 October 2020. This transnational conversation stemmed from “The Mask-Arrayed” project, an interdisciplinary essay project investigating the material, technological, and cultural aspects of face masks.Footnote1 I became engaged with the project in its early infancy—around late March 2020. Initially, encouraged by Lisa Onaga, I joined the team to write something related to my work on the history of the human physiology and diving “masks” of pearl divers, typically referred to as “sea women” (海女, Ama in Japanese and Haenyeo in Korean). Yet while discussing with MPIWG colleagues and reading German and English news reports in April, I could not help but notice a discomforting point being made that required an urgent academic intervention: an emerging discourse of “Asian mask-wearers.”
