Abstract
How might STS learn more from the intersection between ‘Western’ and ‘other’forms of knowledge without reifying it or washing it away into a confusion ofcomplexity? The principle of symmetry is a promising point of departure since ittreats the two even-handedly, while at the same time the term comes from atradition that frames description in a ‘Western’ manner. In this paper we mobilise the‘multinaturalism’ and ‘equivocal translation’ explored by anthropologist EduardoViveiros de Castro to shift the balance of betrayal to the logic of ‘other’ knowingpractices.We explore the implications of this argument for a moment of encounter in a ChineseMedical consultation in Taiwan in which the practitioner hybridises Chinese Medicine(CM) and biomedicine. Our description is symmetrical, but creates a descriptiveequivocation in which a ‘Chinese medical’ reality is coded into ‘Western’ terms. Wealso use the principle of symmetry to explore the mode of equivocation in theconsultation. Drawing on the history of CM, we argue that this is ‘correlative’ ratherthan analytical, seeking functional correlations, patternings, flows, and propensitiesin local collections of things and symptoms. This mode of equivocation handlesdifference without unearthing particular stable causal mechanisms, and easilyassimilates new elements such as features of biomedicine. Parts of STS (andespecially ANT) also work relationally, but the resources of CM for thinking andworking correlatively to bring together difference are particularly rich. We concludeby briefly considering the scope of a possible ‘correlative’ STS. In such an endeavourthe mode of descriptive equivocation would begin to look very different and STSwould start to betray itself in favour of its CM subject.