A few years ago, when the editors of East Asian Science, Technology and Society pressed me to give examples of what I meant by “Asia as method” in STS, I struggled to illustrate my argument (Anderson 2012). I could only repeat the somewhat evasive statement of Takeuchi Yashimi (2005 [1960]: 65): “It is impossible to state definitely what this may mean.” Like Taiwanese cultural studies scholar Chen Kuan-hsing, I hoped, in his words, that “using Asia as an imaginary anchoring point can allow societies in Asia to become one another's reference points” (2010: xv). Chen envisaged “Asia as method” multiplying “frames of reference in our subjectivity and worldview, so that anxiety over the West can be diluted, and productive critical work can move forward” (223). For me, this suggested a means to reorient STS—in particular, to refigure East Asia as a site of theory making in STS, not just a space for data extraction or a place to which European concepts diffused. I was postulating an Asia that is good to think with, and think from, in STS, rather than a fixed, hegemonic geographical region or essential civilizational entity. I saw this project—the assembling of a deliberately untidy cognitive platform on which to build a different STS—through a postcolonial lens, in the sense that...
