Article ID: CBB625250533

Chinese Medicine on the Move into Central Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on Correlativity and Decentering STS (March 2018)

unapi

Contributing to the ongoing debate on decentering science, technology, and society (STS) from Western contexts, this article elaborates on and reconsiders Wen-yuan Lin and John Law’s proposal for correlative STS (“A Correlative STS” 2014). Like them, we empirically draw on Chinese medicine (CM) and its relation to biomedicine, but we explore the modes by which CM was enacted in the historical, political, and sociomaterial settings of socialist and postsocialist Central Europe. We show that not only specific correlations but also correlativity itself—as the ontological stance of the actors—are situated and can shift. Our argument regarding STS is twofold. First, while Lin and Law argue that STS needs to develop an appropriate mode of betrayal when translating across ontological differences from a source language to a destination language (Western analytics), we show that in our case an ethnographer cannot find any single source language. Consequently, we argue that STS should study actors’ modes and moves of betrayal and their doing ontology as an open process. Second, unlike Lin and Law, who postulate the Chinese mode of international as “subtle” and “minimalist” and an alternative to the Western mode (Lin and Law 2013), we argue that with the rise of China and the changing world political economy, STS needs to be more attentive to dominating expansions that come from non-Western locations as much as from the West.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB625250533/

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Authors & Contributors
Fuchs, Martina
Jorge Gibert Galassi
Schalljo, Martin
Vessuri, Hebe
Zhang, Qiong
Zhan, Mei
Concepts
Medicine, Chinese traditional
Medicine
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
East Asia, civilization and culture
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Western world, civilization and culture
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
Medieval
20th century
19th century
Qing dynasty (China, 1644-1912)
Places
China
Latin America
Germany
United States
Russia
Tibet
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