Reading John Law and Wen-yuan Lin's “Provincializing STS,” I can only suppose that I am expected to engage with it as a cultural anthropologist who has studied the social life of traditional Chinese medicine in China. Certainly, I am interested in how these authors, both outsiders (like me) to the technicalities of Chinese medicine, have found resources for thinking about the global sciences through experiencing clinical practice in Taiwan. But before engaging with the lives and truths of a non-Western medical system as Law and Lin present it, I want to take up a more fundamental challenge their article presents.
The authors argue that we—historians and sociologists of scientific knowledge and practice, writing mostly in English—push beyond the principle of symmetry in the work of science and technology studies. “Symmetry between true knowledge claims and those that were false,” they note, “was crucial to [our earlier colleagues in] the sociology of scientific knowledge” (213). Further, an even-handed extension of agency and efficacy to nonhuman realms has also been important to theory, far beyond STS. Actor-network theory with its distributed agency has led some social thought away from epistemological and cognitive abstractions to encourage a return to history and ethnography. In this turn to the concrete and the particular, the authors display a certain agnosticism about theory and universals. More important, they implicitly historicize a theory-practice or theory-case divide in our methodological assumptions. One outcome of a more serious engagement with other rationalities might be a revived vision of hybrid praxis for a hegemonic Western academy. Though we want more than just “theory from the South” (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2012), we still don't know the contours of the symmetries we seek in a truly postcolonial STS.
