On the Margins of Science: Boundary-Crossing Work and the “Making Chinese Medicine Scientific” Movement

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Lay Expertise and Boundary Work

Abstract

This article explores how Chinese medicine practitioners navigated biomedical practitioners’ efforts to demarcate non-biomedicine from science during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on archival documents from the “Making Chinese Medicine Scientific” movement, I examine epistemic practices deployed by Chinese medicine practitioners in bridging the relationship between their medical knowledge and science. Existing theories of boundary-work often obscure power asymmetries between epistemic groups and overlook how such practices reshape the groups’ own epistemology. In contrast, by reinterpreting the definition of science, the marginalized group rebuilt diverse legitimate relationships between Chinese medicine and science and pluralized their medical epistemology. I conceptualize and theorize their strategies as “boundary-crossing work”. By analyzing three distinct ways of defining science— based on efficacy, biomedical knowledge, and reasoning—this article demonstrates how these practitioners successfully established the relationship with science and transformed Chinese medicine into three epistemic variants: Pragmatists, Westernizers, and Rationalists. This case demonstrates that epistemic groups employ distinct strategies contingent on their positions to engage with science. This suggests that boundary-crossing work constitutes a unique form of epistemic politics, through which marginalized knowledge systems actively pluralize science rather than merely seeking inclusion.

Author

• Jian Meng, University of New Mexico