Towards a collaborative ethos
Towards a collaborative ethos Collaboration is a key thread in the wide-ranging experimental work of Paul Rabinow. This experimental work of giving form to a collaborative ethics of anthropology can…
Adjacency and secession
Adjacency and secession What matters is not what we know but how we learn. This principle of inquiry shapes Paul Rabinow’s life work. It is also an ethics, an aspiration.…
Concept-work: In its passions and throes
Concept-work: In its passions and throes This short essay is a brief account of my encounters with Paul Rabinow over some thirty years, forming a close relationship although we were…
Law, society, and the anthropology of noncontemporaneous contemporary
Law, society, and the anthropology of noncontemporaneous contemporary Go to Source
The work of uncertainty: Relational aesthetics in contemporary Iran
The work of uncertainty: Relational aesthetics in contemporary Iran Go to Source
Liberate yourself by examining and analyzing
Liberate yourself by examining and analyzing This essay explores touchstones in the thought and teaching of Paul Rabinow, connecting his work on biosociality and modernizing practices to deeper commitments. The…
Acting counter to our time
Acting counter to our time This essay poses the question of the timeliness of anthropological knowledge. Paul Rabinow’s writings suggest that anthropological research has a particular relationship to the demands…
The song of power: A fugue of dystopia and racial regeneration
The song of power: A fugue of dystopia and racial regeneration In this paper I take the form of the fugue in music to query a contemporary dynamic. It is…
If only there was a Department of Fieldwork in Philosophy
If only there was a Department of Fieldwork in Philosophy Fieldwork in philosophy amounts to a second-order philosophical anthropology. It examines contemporary forms of the human by attending to lower-level…
The future
The future In the 1990s and early 2000s, Rabinow turned to the study of emergent assemblages, which are rooted in the recent past and possess an uncertain future. The turn…
Darwin’s hug: Ideologies of gesture in the science of human exceptionalism
Darwin’s hug: Ideologies of gesture in the science of human exceptionalism This article reviews accounts of “hugging” across evolutionary paradigms to expose how understandings of gesture are shaped by scientific…
Preface: An anthropologist of the contemporary
Preface: An anthropologist of the contemporary This Festschrift presents essays from a symposium organized in honor of Paul Rabinow. Our hope is that, collectively, the essays offer a sense of…
Paul Rabinow, midst anthropology’s problems
Paul Rabinow, midst anthropology’s problems Paul Rabinow’s essay “Midst anthropology’s problems,” published in Cultural Anthropology in 2001, is both a midpoint and a point of inflection in Rabinow’s intellectual trajectory.…
Fieldwork: Problems we are still required to think
Fieldwork: Problems we are still required to think This article re-engages with Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco, originally published in 1977, to consider the ways in which social…
When we were modern
When we were modern This essay situates Paul Rabinow’s work on modernist planning relative to the discipline of anthropology at the end of the 1980s, recalling the significance of treating…
The burden of choice and the triumph of the event: Freedom in the Yemeni revolution
The burden of choice and the triumph of the event: Freedom in the Yemeni revolution In the anthropology of ethics there has been a growing interest in the concept of…
Censorship, foreclosure, and the three deaths of Fengzhen
Censorship, foreclosure, and the three deaths of Fengzhen This article draws on Judith Butler’s distinction between censorship and foreclosure, and on Saidiya Hartman’s work about how to narrate the silences…
Twilight states: Comparing case studies of hysteria and spirit possession
Twilight states: Comparing case studies of hysteria and spirit possession This article compares two case studies: that of Anna O., whose hysteria helped found psychoanalysis, with that of possessed Wolof…
Born again, again: Witchcraft, Pentecostal conversions, and spiritual rebirth in the Trobriand Islands
Born again, again: Witchcraft, Pentecostal conversions, and spiritual rebirth in the Trobriand Islands In the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), yoyowa (consistently translated as “witches” by English-speaking Trobrianders)…
“I like you being here”: To understand and be understood through illustration
“I like you being here”: To understand and be understood through illustration In this article, I establish some reasons why neurodivergent (ND) people are unlocatable in anthropology and examine a…