A striking feature of these inquiries into the character of East Asian STS theories is the way they highlight the issue of community in the field of STS as much as theory itself. The success of EASTS in creating not only a publishing venue but a real community of scholars results in large measure from the serious interrogation of the significance of the enterprise of East Asian STS by Daiwie Fu and the many contributors to EASTS. The engagement of Asian scholars with each other and with this idea of what East Asian STS could be has produced a fertile body of work characterized by its empirical richness and, as Warwick Anderson has noted, a novel collection of questions and research sites grounded in the heterogeneous realities of technoscience in Asia. The intellectual fruits of "Asia as method.' " therefore, are already abundantly evident. Yet empirical richness is not quite enough. As Ruey-Lin Chen, Jia-shin Chen, and Anderson persuasively argue, Asian STS, in terms of both community and intellectual foundations, can and should be a site of significant theoretical agency for the wider field of STS. How can this happen? Is it a question of just nurturing the community and waiting patiently for novel theoretical insights to emerge (recognizing how slowly indeed truly novel theories ever emerge, in any intellectual community)? It surely seems important to encourage scholars, as Jia-shin Chen so aptly puts it, to "tinker with, experiment on, and contribute to" STS theories, but is it enough? Are there other problems that stand in the way of East Asian STS becoming a robust site for theoretical innovation?
