Situated Expertise: A Theoretical Study of Expertise and Local Knowledge through Medical Practice in China’s Cultural Revolution

Chang Liu, The New School for Social Research

This paper is a theoretical study of expertise and the politics of local knowledge in social action. Through reviewing different approaches to expertise (Collins and Evans 2007; Eyal 2013; Arminen and Simonen 2021), following Donna Haraway (1988)’s feminist theory of objectivity knowledge, I would like to propose an important quality of expertise: its "situatedness" in social interaction, i.e., expertise is not fixed or static, but inclusive, malleable, and fluid, which can be shaped, adjusted, and even transformed in social interaction. To examine the situatedness of expertise empirically in a different social context, I analyze medical expertise in China’s Cultural Revolution based on the archival data of a few excerpts documenting the process of a new socialist medical expertise in formation. During China’s Cultural Revolution, many professional medical doctors and scientists were sent down to the countryside or organized to consist the “mobile” medical team responsible for providing medical services to rural residents and training the “barefoot doctors”. In their medical interaction with local rural residents, the professional doctors actively adjust the form of their medical expertise and orient it to the needs of the local residents. They demonstrate how expertise is situated in social interaction. In the words of Donna Haraway (1988: 590), like situated knowledges, situated expertise are “about communities, not about isolated individuals”. Through the interaction between the medical mobile team and the community they serve, we see how their medical expertise is sensitive and responsive to local needs and can be adjusted, transforming into a new form to accomplishing different medical tasks.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 138. Expertise and Accountability in Medicine: Case Studies from Around the World