Paul Rabinow

Anthropology at Berkeley

Anthropology Faculty
Research Interests

My work has consistently centered on modernity as a problem: problem for those seeking to live with its diverse forms, a problem for those seeking to advance
or resist modern projects of power and knowledge. This work has ranged from descendants of a Moroccan saint coping with the changes wrought by colonial and
post-colonial regimes, to the wide array of knowledges and power relations entailed in the great assemblage of social planning in France, to my work of the last decade on molecular biology and genomics.

I now call this approach an anthropology of reason. Anthropos + logos. Who are the humans at issue and what knowledges constitute them and help them to understand themselves and their environments.

My current research centers on developments in post-genomics and molecular diagnostics. It seeks to invent an analytic framework to understand the issues of bio-politics and bio-security. A related research interest is the contemporary moral terrain with special attention to "affect."
Representative Publications

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.

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