Paul Rabinow, Professor
Anthropology, Sociocultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology
Cultural anthropology, social thought, modernity, biotechnology, global genomics; France.
Profile
If anthropology is understood as being composed of anthropos + logos, then anthropology can be taken up as a practice of studying how the mutually productive relations of knowledge, thought, and care are given form within shifting relations of power. I have developed a distinctive approach to an “anthropology of the contemporary” that moves methodologically beyond modernity as an object of study or as a metric to order all inquiries.
My work has consistently confronted the challenge of inventing and practicing new forms of inquiry, writing, and ethics for the human sciences. I argue that currently the dominant knowledge production practices, institutions, and venues for understanding things human in the 21st century are inadequate institutionally and epistemologically. In response, I have designed modes of experimentation and collaboration consisting in focused concept work and the explorations of new forms of case-based inquiry. The equipment for such inquiry is presented at: www.bios-technika.net.
I have also devoted a great deal of energy to the invention of new venues, adjacent to the existing university structures, diagnosing the university’s disciplinary organization and career patterns as among the major impediment to 21st century thought. We need venues that are adjacent to, but more flexible than, the university and the existing disciplinary structure. The Anthropology Research on the Contemporary (ARC), www.anthropos-lab.net (ARC) was founded by as part of an effort to create new forms of inquiry in the human sciences. Its aspiration is to create models for new infrastructures, tools of collaboration, and practices of inquiry.
Representative Publications
2011. The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary, University of Chicago Press.
2008. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, with G. Marcus, Duke University Press.
2007. Making Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary, Princeton University Press.
2007. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco – 30th Anniversary Edition with a new preface. University of California Press (Chinese, Polish).
2007. “Concept Work,” in Genetics and the Social Sciences: Making Biosociality, Routledge.
2005. “The Iceland Controversy: Reflections on the Transnational Market of Civic Virtue,” in Global Assemblages. Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Blackwell.
2005. “Life Sciences: Discontents and Consolations,” in Is Human Nature Obsolete? Genetics, Bioengineering, and the Future of the Human Condition, MIT Press.
2004. A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles, with Talia Dan-Cohen, Princeton University Press.
2003. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment, Princeton University Press. [German 2004].
2003. The Essential Foucault, (with Nikolas Rose), New York: The New Press.
1999. French DNA, Trouble in Purgatory, University of Chicago Press. [French 2000].
1997. Essays in the Anthropology of Reason, Princeton University Press. [Portugese 1999, German 2004].
1997. Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, Vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Series editor and editor of Vol. 1. The New Press.
1996. Making PCR, A Story of Biotechnology, University of Chicago Press. [French, Japanese, Chinese, Italian].
1989. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, MIT Press. (University of Chicago Press, 1995). [French, 2004].
1987. Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look (with W. Sullivan), University of California Press.
1984. The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books.
1983. Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (with Hubert Dreyfus) University of Chicago Press. (2nd edition). [French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Russian.]
1978. Interpretive Social Science: A Reader, (with W. Sullivan) University of California Press.
1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, University of California Press. [French, Spanish, Japanese].
1975. Symbolic Domination: Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco, University of Chicago Press.