ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Translating East Asian Psyches: Cold War Transculturalists and the Making of Japaneseness and Chineseness across the Pacific

• In Event: Transcultural Psychiatry and the Sinophone Pacific

English Abstract

Transcultural psychiatry, as a Cold War science, unfolded through practices of cultural translation across multiple locales. The network of these “translation zones”—including McGill University, the East–West Center, and National Taiwan University—emerged through transpacific linkages that connected psychological anthropologists and psychiatrists from Japan, Taiwan (then “Free China”), and North America. Shaped by modernisation theory and neo-Freudianism, these Cold War transculturalists constructed Japaneseness and Chineseness through comparative fieldwork, diagnostic instruments, and ethnographic collaboration that rendered mental difference legible across cultures. Tracing the movements of Taiwanese psychiatrist Hsien Rin, this paper reconstructs the transpacific network that made East Asian psyches objects of scientific knowledge. It shows how Japaneseness and Chineseness became key categories for conceptualising modern East Asian subjectivity. As Cold War geopolitics shifted in the 1970s, the “Chineseness” of Free China grew contested. Yet, figures such as Rin, Arthur Kleinman, Wen-Shing Tseng, and Yih-Yuan Li sustained implicit dialogues on the Chinese mind—as synthesising, or psychoanalytically marked by orality—leaving enduring traces in medical anthropology. This transpacific history not only reframes the historiography of cultural translation through an East Asian lens of psychoanalysis, transcultural psychiatry, and psychological anthropology, but it also illuminates how East Asian scholars reconfigured global frameworks within (post)colonial contexts. As argued, this transnational history of the Cold War transculturalists is necessary for any decolonising agenda of the psy sciences in the Chinese-speaking world.

Author

• Alex Hsu-Chun Liu, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University