Paul Rabinow

Paul M. Rabinow (June 21, 1944 – April 6, 2021) was a professor of anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley), director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), and former director of human practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He worked with, and wrote extensively about, the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Rabinow was born in Florida but raised in New York City from a young age. His grandparents were all Russian Jewish immigrants. He lived in Sunnyside, Queens. He stated that at the time, the neighborhood was a garden city and a socialist and communist 'zone'. He attended Stuyvesant High School. Rabinow received his B.A. (1965), M.A. (1967), and Ph.D. (1970) in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (1965–66). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro (1987), taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1986) as well as the École Normale Supérieure (1997), and was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of Iceland (1999). He held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation Professional Development Fellowships (for training in molecular biology). He was co-founder of the Berkeley Program in French Cultural Studies. He was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1998. He received the University of Chicago Alumni Association Professional Achievement Award in 2000. He was awarded the visiting Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the École Normale Supérieure for 2001–2002. STICERD Distinguished Visiting Professor – BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, London School of Economics (2004). Rabinow died on April 6, 2021.

Rabinow is known for his development of an "anthropology of reason". 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. More recently, Rabinow developed a distinctive approach to what he called an "anthropology of the contemporary" that moves methodologically beyond modernity as an object of study or as a metric to order all inquiries.

Rabinow is well known for conceptual work drawing on French, German, and American traditions. He was a close interlocutor of Michel Foucault and edited and interpreted Foucault's work as well as ramifying it in new directions.

Rabinow's work consistently confronted the challenge of inventing and practicing new forms of inquiry, writing, and ethics for the human sciences. He argued that, currently, the dominant knowledge production practices, institutions, and venues for understanding human things in the 21st century are inadequate institutionally and epistemologically. In response, he designed modes of experimentation and collaboration consisting of focused concept work and the explorations of new forms of case-based inquiry.

Rabinow 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 impediments to 21st century thought. Since the organization and practices of the social sciences and humanities in the U.S. university system have changed little in recent decades, they are unlikely to facilitate the composition of contemporary equipment. Rabinow called for the creation of venues that are adjacent to, but more flexible than, the university and the existing disciplinary structure. He played leading roles in the design of two such organizations, the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC).

The Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory was founded by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff 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. The core of the ARC collaboratory is ongoing reflection and communication in a now broadening network of scholars about concept formation and collaboratory work in the human sciences. ARC is a collaboratory for inquiry into contemporary forms of life, labor, and language. ARC engages in empirical study and conceptual work with global reach and long-term perspective. ARC creates contemporary equipment for collaborative work adequate to emergent challenges in the 21st century. ARC's current concerns focus on interconnections among security, ethics, and the sciences.

The relation of concepts and cases in Rabinow's work distinguishes itself from the more common mode of social science work predicated on using examples to test general theories or philosophical practice that seeks analytic clarity about universals or general (often highly abstract) cases. In contrast, Rabinow argues that work on concepts opens up and orients inquiry into the concrete features of distinctive cases, whereas the use of ostensibly timeless theory or universal concepts is unlikely to be very helpful in drawing attention to particularities and singularities. Given this goal, such traditional approaches can function as a real impediment to inquiry. Rabinow defines concept work as “constructing, elaborating and testing a conceptual inventory as well as specifying and experimenting with multi-dimensional diagnostic and analytic frames.” In that sense, Rabinow's work continues with appropriate modifications a social scientific tradition stretching from Max Weber through Clifford Geertz.