I have spent much of my professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West, first on both sides of the Cold War divide and, more recently, on the cusp between the Islamic and Western worlds. Over time, I have come to see the relationships between these seemingly polar fields as a problem not of geography or politics (or even geo-politics) but of thought, ideas, and knowledge – that is, as essential problems of epistemology. Now, I am applying this same insight to the social history of ideas more generally in a new project that poses the question, How do we think about stuff?