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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• complementary and alternative medicine
• correlativity
• evidence-based medicine
• decentering STS
• Chinese medicine
• Central and Eastern Europe
• political economy

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Luděk Brož, Marcela Linková, Filip Vostal, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. We also thank the Czech Science Foundation, which supported our research project “Medicine Multiple: Ethnography of the interfaces between biomedical and alternative therapeutic practices” (contract no. 15–16452S).

Notes

¹ Both local CM practitioners and the Chinese delegations currently exporting CM to the CR usually attach the adjective traditional to their references to “Chinese medicine.” However, the meaning behind their use of traditional varies widely. While local CM practitioners use the adjective to distinguish the versions of CM that are not connected to the Chinese state or government, the version of CM promoted by the current corporate-governmental initiative refers to the integrative “Traditional Chinese Medicine” that “thrives on the contemporary global health market in a neoliberal climate” (Hsu 2008a: 465). Except for direct quotes and names of institutions, we mostly stick here to the generic term Chinese medicine, like Lin and Law (2014) and others (Andrews 2014; Scheid 2002; Zhan 2009).

² On the rich history of medical acupuncture in socialist Czechoslovakia, see Stöckelová and Klepal forthcoming.

³ These kinds of integrated approaches seem to be common across East Asia. Similar combinations of modern Western and traditional Eastern medicine have been documented and studied in Vietnam (Wahlberg 2014) and South Korea (Kim 2006).

⁴ The amendment to Act 96, 2004, on the conditions of obtaining and recognizing qualifications for nonmedical professions and activities related to the provision of health care, which is being discussed in the Czech Parliament in 2017, proposes regulating the professions of TCM therapist and TCM specialist on the grounds that “today a number of subjects operate on the territory of the CR [and] claim that they provide traditional CM, but it is impossible to unequivocally verify their education and the extent and quality of the provided care” (Vyzula 2017).

⁵ The Charles Bridge in Prague was used in the logo for the Health Ministers Meeting in June 2015 to smoothly link Prague’s Old Town with the profile of a Chinese city.

⁶ For a view of the project, see iDNES.cz (2016).

⁷ Clinical trials in various stages are under way for the three vaccines; see www.sotio.com/clinical-trials/clinical-trials.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tereza Stöckelová

Tereza Stöckelová is a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and associate professor in the Department of General Anthropology, Charles University, Prague. Her work is situated among sociology, social anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS) and draws on actor network theory and related material semiotic methodologies. She has investigated academic practices in the context of current policy changes, science and society relations, environmental controversies, and, recently, the interfaces between biomedical and alternative therapeutic practices in the Czech Republic.

Jaroslav Klepal

Jaroslav Klepal is a researcher in medical anthropology at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he is working on a project, “Medicine Multiple: Ethnography of the Interfaces between Biomedical and Alternative Therapeutic Practices.” He is also a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, in Prague. His thesis deals with multiple enactments of posttraumatic stress disorder among war veterans in Bosnia and Herzegovina and is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2012.