Paul Rabinow

The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern, as shown for example by numerous fruitful ventures into the "politics and poetics" of anthropology. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the simple insight that anthropology is composed of claims, whether tacit or explicit, about anthropos and about logos--and the myriad ways in which these two Greek nouns have been, might be, and should be, connected.

"In 1993, an American biotechnology company, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and France's premier genetics lab, the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humaine (CEPH), developed plans for a collaborative effort to discover diabetes genes. The two companies had agreed that the CEPH would supply Millennium with a store of genetic material collected from a large number of French families, and Millennium would supply funding and expertise in new technologies to accelerate the identification of the genes, terms that the French government had approved. But in early 1994, just as the collaboration was to begin, the French government abruptly called a halt. The government insisted that under no circumstances could the CEPH be permitted to give the Americans that most precious of all substances - never before named in such a manner - French DNA."--BOOK JACKET. "French DNA is about international competition, the future of human health, ferocious financial conflict and the intersection of culture and science - the place where, finally DNA became French."--BOOK JACKET.

Making PCR is the fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of the invention of one of the most significant biotech discoveries of our time - the polymerase chain reaction. Skillfully blending narrative description and interviews with all the major players, Paul Rabinow explores what it means to be a "scientist" today, the effects of doing science in the high-risk, high-reward environment of biotech, and what a scientific discovery or invention is at a time when it is possible to patent life itself. PCR has profoundly transformed the practices and potential of molecular biology by extending scientists' ability to identify and manipulate genetic material. It facilitates the identification of precise segments of DNA and accurately reproduces millions of copies of the given segment in a short period of time. In sum, Making PCR shows how a contingently assembled practice emerged, composed of distinctive subjects, the site in which they worked, and the object they invented.

In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.--Publisher description.

This book concerns the descendants of a Moroccan marabout, Sidi Lahsen Lyusi, collectively known as the wlad Siyyed ("children of the saint"), who live in a small village near Sefrou, Morocco. Paul Rabinow describes how the wlad sivved have maintained their symbolic and practical dominance over the so-called commoners of the village, persons who cannot claim such descent. He suggests that despite major vicissitudes in Moroccan society over the last century and some significant challenges from the commoners, the wlad siyyed have maintained their hegemony, but at the price of alienation and self-doubt. Alienation, one of the author's theoretical concerns, is "the attempt to maintain a fixed sense of symbolism once other conditions have shifted" (p. 1). In the course of this discussion the author makes interesting, if brief, observations on the nature of social identity in Morocco and the dominant symbols through which Moroccans perceive their society. -- From (Sep. 7, 2016).

In 2006 anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett set out to rethink the role that human sciences play in biological research, creating the Human Practices division of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center--a facility established to create design standards for the engineering of new enzymes, genetic circuits, cells, and other biological entities--to formulate a new approach to the ethical, security, and philosophical considerations of controversial biological work. They sought not simply to act as watchdogs but to integrate the biosciences with their own discipline in a more fundamentally interdependent way, inventing a new, dynamic, and experimental anthropology that they could bring to bear on the center's biological research. Designing Human Practices is a detailed account of this anthropological experiment and, ultimately, its rejection. It provides new insights into the possibilities and limitations of collaboration, and diagnoses the micro-politics which effectively constrained the potential for mutual scientific flourishing. Synthesizing multiple disciplines, including biology, genetics, anthropology, and philosophy, alongside a thorough examination of funding entities such as the National Science Foundation, Designing Human Practices pushes the social study of science into new and provocative territory, utilizing a real-world experience as a springboard for timely reflections on how the human and life sciences can and should transform each other.

In this culmination of his search for anthropological concepts and practices appropriate to the 21st century, Paul Rabinow contends that to make sense of the contemporary, anthropologists must invent new forms of inquiry.