Theorizing STS from Asia—Toward an STS Multiscale Bioecology Framework: A Blurred Genre Manifesto/Agenda for an Emergent Field

Abstract

East Asia and Southeast Asia provide at least four relational locales or sites of cultural critique and materials for new twenty-first-century theory construction governed by growing biological and ecological knowledge. I document a moment in East Asian and Southeast Asian STS that grounds methodological advocacy for how anthropological STS initiatives revise received models and theories and how they work from multiple and differentiated Asian sites, thereby focusing on the importance of Asian examples in global theory without sliding into meaningless discussions of Asian essentialisms or East versus West orientalisms and occidentalisms. The four relational technoscientific sites and perspectives are those of (a) scientists as social hieroglyphs and peopled networks; (b) hidden curriculums and education reforms; (c) geoportraits of influencing machines, bioecological entanglements, and cultural flows; and (d) disaster and repair cycles, new and old cultural genres for coping, and structures of feelings. By citing the growing new anthropological STS ethnographic work in a variety of Asian locales, I suggest that new narratives and models are already out there as emergent forms of life, that is, as contested, shifting third spaces (forming in the interstices of old distinctions and categories) and ethical plateaus (terrains of decision making where multiple technological changes intersect and impose double-binds or trade-offs among simultaneous imperatives).

• peopled networks
• hidden curriculums
• bioecological entanglements
• disaster-and-repair cycles
• structures of feeling

Notes

¹ For discussions of these interpretive dilemmas, the way artists themselves are subject to negotiating these contradictory demands, and the way in which institution affordances for exhibition also are shaped by these contradictory interpretive imperatives, see Welland 2018 and Teh 2017.

² But see also, more generally, on technoscientific networks, Sunder Rajan 2006, 2017; on the targeting of clinical labor for transnational trials, tissue donation, and surrogacy in India, Cooper and Waldby 2014; on unintended consequences of “ethical” laws banning sale of kidney organs in India set within transnational training and return migration of surgeons, and expanding bioavailability with new technologies, Cohen 1999 and 2008; on fetal cell “medical tourism” to China, Song 2017; on air quality, environmentalism, and land use conflicts in Hong Kong entangling questions of legitimacy and authority of expertise between transnational nongovernmental organizations and local organizations, Choy 2011; and on IVF and biotech ethics in China and the United States, Jiang 2014 and Jiang and Stevens 2015.

³ This is an industry that “creative city” programs in China are rushing to try to emulate (Jiang 2011) and feed into new quantitative indices of governance, called now zonghe guoli (comprehensive national power), that include measure of cultural productivity (Greenhalgh 2009).

⁴ For an EASTS review of Aihwa Ong’s book, see Fischer 2018a. Ong and Chen’s (2010) earlier edited volume on Asian biotech, which appears in the Experimental Futures series I coedit with Joe Dumit at Duke University Press (which also publishes EASTS), is an important first effort to map anthropological STS initiatives.

⁵ Yinling Ng was the scriptwriter. Not to take anything away from her and her student team, part of the professionalism was aided by guidance from veteran playwright Huzir Sulaiman and director (now also well-known playwright) Joel Tan. The University Presidential Scholars program has been and continues to be an important venue for producing student plays. The play is available online (see Ng, Tan, and Heng 2012).

⁶ Filipino art critic Patrick D. Flores is one of the most insightful of these theorists. David Teh has recently added his voice, however, in a somewhat more national frame for Thailand with a similar focus on what comes after the repetitive traditional symbols and romanticisms of most twentieth-century Thai art (Teh 2017).

⁷ Banerjee (2011) reviews Jacob Copeman’s (2008) ethnography of blood donation and Aditya Bharadwaj and Peter Glasner’s (2009) work on maverick stem cell research in India, suggesting they are more like Lawrence Cohen’s (2008) “bioavailability” developed with Indian ethnographic examples than like Rabinow’s “biosociality” developed with French examples in mind (Rabinow 1999, Rabinow and Rose 2006). Walberg (2011) reviews the 2010 volumes edited by Aihwa Ong and Nancy Chen and by Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner, suggesting that both are heavily marked by Foucauldian theory, with its presumptions of change toward neoliberalism, but (along with Greenhalgh 2009) suspecting that “old school public health” governance has more effects than new biotech projects do, despite the cultural prestige goals of the latter. Sleeboom-Faulkner (2011) reviews volumes on the one-child policy, ultra-low fertility, health and hygiene, abortion, and moral experience and governance of life.

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Michael M. J. Fischer

Michael M. J. Fischer teaches at MIT. His latest book is Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory and Method for the Twenty-First Century (2018).