Provincializing Sts: Postcoloniality, Symmetry, and Method

Volume 11, Issue 2

1 The Problem

STS is not short of studies on postcoloniality. Collectively the discipline has explored how technoscience works differently in different global locations, and fine case studies have explored postcolonial forms of domination. For instance, we have learned about Indian nuclear power (Abraham 1998, 2000), sub-Saharan therapeutic inequalities (Rottenburg 2009), the extractions of bioprospecting (Hayden 2007), how broken-down European technologies achieve an afterlife in the global South (Beisel and Schneider 2012), the complexities of transnational movements of Chinese medicine (Zhan 2009), how psychotropic drugs open people to spirit attack in Chile (Bonelli 2012), mapping and crafting as alternative modes of knowing (Turnbull 2000), and the entanglements of dogs and people in colonial histories (Haraway 2008). 1 These are just a few of the many postcolonial case studies in STS—and since Euro-America is not a monolith, there also are many analogous studies of the postcolonial within the colonizing countries themselves (see Mol 2002, 2008; Moser 2008; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Singleton and Law 2013).

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