Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects on prominent analytic categories of STS from a decolonial perspective. With a case study of knowledge translation, the study provides a new account of Actor-network Theory and Latour’s Modern Constitution

Paper long abstract:

For the past decade, the discourse of “decolonizing STS” has increasingly entered the discipline of Science and Technology Studies. Contributing to this trend, the proposed study aims to provide a reflection and reevaluation of prominent analytic categories from STS. With a case study of the circulation of knowledge between the Global South and the Global North, the study intends to give a new account of Actor-network Theory and Latour’s Modern Constitution from a decolonial perspective.

The study introduces the case of neurasthenia/Shenjing Shuairuo, a medical phenomenon characterized by its movements between Chinese medicine and American psychiatry. The diagnostic term “Shenjing Shuairuo” (nervous weakness) emerged in Republican China when Chinese Medicine was undergoing major transformations under the existential threat of Western medicine. With the term, Chinese doctors conformed to the hegemony of Western science while securing the space for their indigenous medical practice. Conversely, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) re-introduced Shenjing Shuairuo as a Chinese cultural phenomenon into the DSM in the 1990s, to defend their discipline by responding to the criticism of ethnocentrism from medical anthropology.

The paradoxical nature of neurasthenia/Shenjing Shuairuo between scientism and culturalism can provide a new perspective for the Latourian Great Divides, which tends to underestimate the agency of non-Western actors, and Actor-network Theory, which often disregards the impact of coloniality. With a symmetrical analytic structure, the study investigates how coloniality/modernity shaped the epistemic asymmetries of knowledge translation in the middle space between the West and the non-West, as well as between Nature and Culture.