John Law and Wen-yuan Lin's “Provincializing STS: Postcoloniality, Symmetry, and Method” in this issue is an ambitious article, proposing a new postcolonial approach to STS studies. Law and Lin attempt to extend the principle of symmetry to non-Western and Western. They argue that the analytical-institutional complex in STS scholarship has produced postcolonial intellectual asymmetries. A crucial asymmetry, they believe, is that Euro-American STS produces theories and that non-Euro-American STS does case studies. They suggest that this asymmetry might be redressed if we carry out postcolonial investigations using non-Western analytical resources.
To present the problem and their arguments substantively, Law and Lin take Taiwan's situation as an example. They start with an interesting dialogue that happened in Taiwan in 2009. That year, Law was first invited to visit Taiwan and gave a seminar in which he and Lin encountered rather disconcerting experiences that resulted from the collision of two different metaphysical worlds. Hsin-Hsing Chen, a Taiwanese STS scholar, talked of his experiences at a festival for the goddess Mazu. His experiences clashed with Law's Euro-American theory, built as it was on a Western metaphysical system quite different from the Chinese metaphysical system of Taiwan. Lin rather felt as if shenshouyichu 身首異處—“his head and his body are in different places.” (215) Lin, as a Western-trained STS scholar and a Chinese-speaking Taiwanese, felt “that his head is full of Euro-American theory and knowledge while his body inhabits Taiwan” (215). Law and Lin believe that this kind of situation is not peculiar to Taiwanese STS. They suggest that any postcolonial STS needs to attend to these kinds of issues, “not just in Taiwan or China but, for instance, in the Spanish-, Portuguese-, or Hindi-speaking worlds” (216).
