John Law and Wen-yuan Lin: Chakrabarty’s Problem
Here is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s problem. To understand subaltern actions he
has a choice. He can use the categories of Western knowing. For instance, he
can say that people’s actions are guided by their belief in Gods. Or he can
use the categories of subaltern knowing instead. For instance, he can say,
instead, that Gods indeed have agency. This power-saturated dilemma is
poignant for the Western-educated Indian historian. Whose categories
should be used? But it is a dilemma that also confronts critical social
science. When and how should we export our own criteria for understanding
difference? Or when and how should our categories bend in the face of
difference?
The issue is political and epistemological, but it is also ontological. It is about
what there is in the world, how it acts, and indeed whether there is such a
thing as ‘a world’. We use recent work in STS and cultural anthropology to
explore ontological – and therefore epistemological and political –translations
across ontological difference by drawing on the work of Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro. Viveiros de Castro tells us that in Amerindian cosmology there are
multiple natures interpreted through a single cultural perspective. This, then,
is not the multiculturalism with which we are familiar, but rather its inverse,
multinaturalism. That is, there is one culture but there are multiple natures
or realities. To describe between natures is therefore to use the same words
(homonyms) to describe things that are different. Translation thus
necessarily conceals difference.
This cannot be avoided. However, it does suggest that, when confronted by
ontological difference, we may have some choice about what to conceal and
what not. The paper works through empirical examples, focusing in
particular on an instance of Chinese medical practice in a clinic in Taiwan.
This reality can be described in ‘Western’ social science terms, but if we
make the move to ontological difference, then to do so is to conceal
differences important in a ‘Chinese’ world. We therefore offer an alternative
possible ‘Chinese’ account of these practices. The implication is that a
‘Chinese’ social science would look quite unlike its ‘Western’ counterpart,
and therefore that a critical solution to Chakrabarty’s problem will lead to a
social science that multiple, and contexted or situated.