Onward to the Past

Abstract

East Asian Science, Technology and Society East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2014) 8:479–481 DOI 10.1215/18752160-2820019 Onward to the Past Geoffrey C. Bowker q Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan 2014 What a wonderful set of articles this is to think with. They frame the issue of what it means to archive knowledge, to classify multiplicity, at this point in time. Both the Indian creation of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) and the Chinese drive to systematize ethnic knowledge confront immediate aporias. In order for the TKDL to do its work, it must assume categories recognizable by, in the first instance, the European Patent Office. For the Chinese project to succeed, over- lapping heterogeneous modes of treating the body must be coalesced into clear ethnic clusters. Each exercise is historiographically deep and an exquisite instrument for understanding the present. Let us start with the issue of justice. These four articles describe an attempt to achieve justice through archiving. For the (postcolonial) colonizers—led by big Pharma—have indeed endeavored to prospect knowledge out of those countries whose raw materials they can no longer pillage. Each project is about making a statement in the present. But how does one make statements in this present? Gilles Deleuze, working through his reading of Michel Foucault, published in 1972 a tract entitled Un nouvel archiviste. In it, he imagines making up an archive of utterances (e´nonce´s)—those things that can be said within a given discursive regime. These are not individual sentences or propositions that can proliferate infinitely: they are a primitive and very finite set of available modalities of discourse. When in the world of indigenous knowl- edge, a common utterance is to say: “We knew this substance had this effect before you, and therefore we have rights to it.” Each term here is charged, as so beautifully adumbrated in these articles; here I will concentrate on the first two words, out of which the rest of the utterance unfolds. “We knew.” Farquhar and Lai, partly following Thomas Mullaney (2011), talk of the construction and touristic commercialization of ethnic categories in China where earlier there sometimes were only loose groupings. It is these categories of people created in the present who were then the knowers. Or, as Zhen and Hu put it, “The ancient and the modern are artificially divided, and a linear, homogenous (and thus unhistorical) genealogy of modern nationality medical knowledge is constructed” (this issue, 475). For them, the “we” who knew is created out of a false divide between the past production and current recognition of knowledge by (constructed) national- G. C. Bowker (*) University of California, Irvine Published by Duke University Press