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.