Bull in a China Shop. For a multi-species approach to the disintegration of socio-scientific knowledge on China and its recomposition

Abstract

What is China? How to describe and study it? And what to make of these descriptions and analyses? Can the knowledge we produce about China be brought to bear on conceptual frameworks and theories developed in the West and from a Western perspective? This short text argues that the current state of Chine studies in Italy, the sinophone academia, and the anglosphere demands that we reconsider some of the epistemological assumptions we hold true about how China should behave as an object of social scientific reflection and the ontological and cultural status conferred to the knowledge we produce about it. Drawing from a multispecies imaginary, the texts develop a series of metaphors with which to analytically capture these assumptions and propose ways to translate them into a more orderly and empirically grounded field of inquiry. This field enables transdisciplinary engagements and can be made to serve a theoretically more generative collaborative practice in academia.