“Materialities of Medical Cultures in/between Europe and East Asia” is a 3-year project that brings together the historians and sociologists of medicine in Germany and Taiwan to study materiality as an organizing and explanatory analytic to explore material cultures of healing. We do so via an accommodation between Latourian and cultural perspectives (primarily by taking contingency, change, and stability as historical rather than philosophical markers). Latour established in the 1990s materiality to analyze and show how material participates in the articulation of the social, helping to create categories such as person, machine, immaterial, and, not least, the material itself. Parallel to that material culture studies used materiality as a scholarly space for critiquing and integrating the disciplinary and methodological ferment in the academy. In both fields important work has been done on materiality that, as we argue, has yet to be brought together.

Our aim is to explore how the research on ‘ideology’, ‘culture’ or ‘values’ which was central to material culture studies (and which did not even merit mention in Latour’s Reassembling the Social) reflects new approaches to the material as an articulation of the social. We think that bringing both into combination has set the stage for broad, multi-layered historical explanations in which materiality provides the critical means for the re-interpretations of the largest historical categories: modernity, capitalism, the nation state, the transnational, or problems of locality and/or periodization.

The project is to forge a new direction in thinking through medical practices/things/objects/ practices/knowledge in flux, as assembling and disassembling methods. We ask: How are narratives of coherence created? When are materials seen as aligning with human intentionality, and thus are intimately bound up with culture, as category and historical ontology? When is the material an actor in assembling a historical order, and when does it serve primarily as a source of stability and continuity for particular modes of culture? We will work on materiality in relation to medical culture. This project will overcome the longstanding division between natural sciences (as “responsible” for the study of the material world) and the social and cultural sciences. It will trace the objects and practices that move between domains and regions (East and West) and different value systems and medical practices.

The project is led by Professor Bettina Wahrig (Technische Universitaet Braunschweig), Professor Angelika C. Messner (China Center, Kiel University) and Professor Shang-Jen Li (Institute of Histor and Philology, Academia Sinica). We would like to acknowledge the support of the Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (the German Research Foundation) for jointly founded the project.