Locating Naturecultures

Abstract

Building upon two collaborative exhibits created for the 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) meetings in 2018 and 2019, this essay aims to question established modes of locating matters in STS and related fields. As these exhibits showed, Japan has been an active venue for anthropologists and STS scholars working with a diverse range of approaches and topics that may help us to rethink place and space beyond a humanist spatial politics of globalization. At the same time, science and technology in Japan has been a highly fruitful area for scholars located to understand the co-constitution of knowledges and worlds by tracing their multiple trajectories partly outside of English language research agendas. Using the online journal NatureCulture as a springboard for these explorations, we hope to contribute to the ongoing debates around situated methodological approaches. The journal is intended to be a medium that on the one hand brings young Japanese researchers into closer contact with related debates elsewhere, and on the other hand exhibits novel and challenging results of Japanese anthropology and science studies to a non-Japanese audience. A handful of themes (multiplicities, cosmopolitics, experimentation) from the journal will be reviewed here in order to further explore their potential in locating matters across, as well as beyond, physical and geographic boundaries.