A correlative STS: Lessons from a Chinese medical practice

Abstract

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.

Epistemic cultures in complementary medicine: knowledge-making in university departments of osteopathy and Chinese medicine

“…In this domain, evidence of the correlative approach Lin and Law (2014) describe was apparent, whereby traditional knowledge is placed alongside bioscientific approaches. CML6 described precisely this kind of juxtaposition as integral to effective practice, and tried to help students also achieve this insight:

What I think in practice it’s important to do is to have two minds, to bring two minds to practice, so that you need your Chinese medicine mind in order to be able to practice effectively, you need that; whereas in order to be able to understand your patient and talk to your patient, you need your Western medicine mind, so, you know, you need both.

This partitioning of perspectives was reinforced in the Chinese medicine course I observed, in which the theory of Chinese medicine was taught separately from the bioscience subjects.…”

“…A number of anthropological studies have attempted to unpack the particular ontology of Chinese medicine. Lin and Law (2014), for instance, describe the Chinese medicine world view as ‘correlative’, referring to its emphasis on situated knowing, cosmological view of the body, and weaving of patterns between elements as set out in Chinese philosophy, such as between the kidney (meridian), winter and water. Through a case study of one Chinese medicine clinical encounter, they show how the practitioner draws on both biomedical and Chinese medicine knowledge in her diagnosis and, rather than trying to translate one into the other, places them ‘alongside one another … relating them contextually and correlatively’ (p. 810).…”

‘Things Do Look Different from Here, on the Borderlands’: An Interview with Warwick Anderson

“…It has even held a few of its annual meetings outside Euro-America. But then in a recent interview with the authors of the new Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (which is being released at the Barcelona meeting this year) a map of the affiliations of the authors of articles in the handbook is presented (http://www.4sonline.org/blog/post/handbook_for_the_ages (Lin & Law, 2014, 2015) and yet in their citations the postcolonial special issue that they miss (with which you have engaged) is the one edited by Itty Abraham in The Economic and Political Weekly (Abraham, 2006). But there is also a broader intellectual/analytical issue here.…”

“…Thereafter, in another article, you wrote: ‘While they [actor-network-theorists] shy from any direct engagement with postcolonial studies, they seem to have picked up and amplified the vibe’ (2009, p. 392). More recently, you have celebrated Wen-yuan Lin and John Law’s call for ‘balance of betrayal’ in STS (Lin & Law, 2014), calling their contribution ‘an enticing prospect’ that opens new possibilities for postcolonial investigations. Can you elaborate your intellectual affinity and connections with ANT?…”

The Stickiness of Knowing: Translation, Postcoloniality, and STS

“…By "Chinese-inflected STS" we intend an STS that draws on Chinese (huá wén 華文) or, more specifically, a Han Chinese (hàn yu 漢語) intellectual legacy, rather than a Chinese national (zhōng guó 中國) STS. For details of these experiments seeLaw and Lin 2011, and 2016Lin and Law 2014;and Lin 2016. …”