Paul Rabinow

Biography

Paul Rabinow (21 June 1944 – 6 May 2021) was an American anthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the leading figure in the anthropology of contemporary science and reason.

He took his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1970 with fieldwork in Morocco, and taught at Berkeley from 1978. He was the principal English-language interpreter and editor of Michel Foucault's work — editor of The Foucault Reader (1984) and of the Essential Works — and he founded the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) in 2005.

Key Ideas

• Reflections on fieldwork. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977) was among the first books to make the ethnographer's own position, confusion and relationships the explicit subject rather than the omitted background. It was contentious on publication and is now standard reading, and it belongs to the same reflexive turn that produced Writing Culture (1986), to which Rabinow contributed.
• Anthropology of reason. Rabinow's programme, set out in Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (1996), reverses anthropology's traditional direction of travel. Rather than studying the beliefs of distant others, the anthropologist studies the practices by which the modern West produces truth — laboratories, statistics, standards, ethics committees, regulation. His formulation: anthropology should study "the forms of life through which we have come to be what we are."
• Biosociality. His most cited concept, introduced in "Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality" (1992). Sociobiology attempted to explain culture on the model of nature. Rabinow argued that the reverse was happening: nature was being remade on the model of culture, and new social groups were forming around shared biological facts. Patient advocacy organisations built around a specific mutation, communities of people sharing a genetic risk profile, identities organised around a diagnosis — these are collectivities constituted by biological classification rather than by kinship, locality or class. The concept anticipated by a decade the social forms that genetic testing and patient networks would produce.
• The anthropology of the contemporary. His late methodological project: the study of emergent situations in which existing concepts do not yet fit, requiring the anthropologist to work out an apparatus rather than apply one. He distinguished the "contemporary" from the "modern" — the contemporary being a moving ratio of the old and the new rather than an epoch.
• Making PCR. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (1996) is an ethnography of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction at Cetus Corporation, and a study of how a technique, a company and a set of careers produce one another.

Selected Works

• Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977)
• French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (1989)
• Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (1996)
• Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (1996)
• Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (2003)
• Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology (2012), with Gaymon Bennett

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Rabinow supplies the discipline's strongest argument that anthropology's proper object includes the institutions producing technology, not only the people receiving it — the same move Traweek makes in the laboratory. Biosociality is directly applicable to this field: communities forming around a shared biological or informational classification are now ordinary, and the quantified self is a biosocial formation in Rabinow's exact sense. His experience on the ethics component of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center is also a rare documented case of an anthropologist embedded in a technical programme, and of how badly that can go.

Related Reading

• Sharon Traweek
• Digital Anthropology
• The Quantified Self
• Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
• DIY Bio Movement
• Russ Bernard