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Notoriously, Bruno Latour insists that "we have never been modern." 1 His argument is that modernity presents itself as gleaming, consistent, and coherentas something that is pure rather than fuzzy. Think, for instance, of the mass transit system in twentieth-century London. 2 You have that utterly familiar modernist icon, the red London bus. It is all curves and flat surfaces. You have the underground interior, again all curves and smooth surfaces. On every vehicle, bus stop, and tube station you have a logo in the form of a modernist roundel (more curves and straight lines). You have a clean sans serif typeface that is used for every sign. And you have the distinctive and endlessly mimicked underground map designed by Harry Beck, which appeared in 1933 to replace its more geographically faithful predecessors. Famously, Beck reasoned: "If you're going underground, why do you need [to] bother about geography?. . .

In this paper we explore a moment of intersection between 'Western' and Taiwanese social science knowledge that took place in a Taiwanese seminar in 2009. Our interest is post-colonial: we treat this as an encounter between dominant and subordinate knowledge systems, and follow Helen Verran by conceiving of the bodily disconcertment experienced by the participants as an expression of metaphysical difference. We then provide three contexts for that disconcertment: one, the post-1949 story of Taiwanese economic development; two, the syncretism of Taiwanese street Daoism; and three, the history of philosophy where we draw on contrasts between Western and Chinese traditions. We suggest that each of these contexts is embedded in and informs the disconcertment experienced in the exchange. We then argue that rendering the origins of this disconcertment discursively accountable is performative. Our conclusion is that the cultivation and articulation of disconcertment is a crucial tool for interrogating and moving beyond the metaphysics, the subjectivities, and the institutional organisational forms that together help to reproduce hegemonic Western knowledge traditions.

How might Science and Technology Studies learn more from the intersection between 'Western' and 'other' forms of knowledge? In this article, we use Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's writing on equivocal translation to explore a moment of encounter in a Chinese Medical consultation in Taiwan in which a practitioner hybridizes Chinese Medicine and biomedicine. Our description is symmetrical, but creates a descriptive equivocation in which 'Western' analytical terms are used to describe a 'Chinese' medical reality. Drawing on the history of Chinese Medicine, we argue that the latter is not analytical, but 'correlative' in a specifically 'Chinese' manner that explores patternings, flows, and propensities in local collections of things and symptoms. In particular, it both handles difference without seeking to unearth stable causal mechanisms and absorbs new elements including relevant features of biomedicine. We conclude by briefly considering the scope of a possible post-colonial and 'correlative' STS and show that a 'correlative' description of the same Chinese Medical consultation would differ markedly from one making use of 'Western' analytical assumptions.

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