April 24, 2007
Event: Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, 30th Anniversary
UC Press and University Press Books
Invite You to an Author Event with
Paul Rabinow, author of
Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco
Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
5:30-7:30, Tuesday, May 8, 2007
2430 Bancroft Way (located directly across the street from the campus of the University of California at Berkeley and its renowned Zellerbach Hall, on Bancroft Way, between Telegraph and Dana)
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.
Paul Rabinow is a Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A., M.A., and PhD. at the University of Chicago. Professor Rabinow is arguably most famous for his work with Michel Foucault during Foucault’s time at Berkeley. His 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 his work of the last decade on molecular biology and genomics. He now calls this approach an anthropology of reason.