ABSTRACT
How can ANT travel well across the differences between itself and the Others? For instance, what kind of controlled equivocation is needed when deploying ANT on Chinese medicine (CM)? ANT has enriched itself when travelling across sites, but most of the cases important to its conceptual development come from Euro-America. The consequence of this is that when exploring cases such as CM, this ‘ANT-immobile’ has continued to draw on a relatively stable intellectual apparatus committed to a naturalistic version of the empirical. Drawing on CM practices in Taiwan, this chapter reflects on how ANT-immutable flattens empirical and ontological differences with its infra-language. Warning against the politics of assimilation, this chapter describes CM resources of world-mattering such as correlativity, shi and patterning in practice, and sketches how CM allows itself to be mistranslated and absorbed into the empirical realities that it encounters. These interferences between ANT and CM in these Taiwanese encounters are just one set of possibilities, the lesson lies in how ANT might learn from the CM method to differentiate the endless differences in their specific intersections.
