Paul Rabinow

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Paul Rabinow (2002)

Paul Rabinow ( June 21, 1944 - April 6, 2021 ) was an American anthropologist . He held the Chair of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and was Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) and Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) . Outside the anthropological discipline, Rabinow was best known for his work on the French philosopher Michel Foucault .

Rabinow's most influential works include Michel Foucault. Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (with Hubert Dreyfus , 1983, German 1987), anthropology of reason. Studies on Science and Lifestyle (1997, German 2004), Anthropos Today. Reflections on Modern Equipment (2003) and Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (2007).

Life

Paul Rabinow studied anthropology at the University of Chicago , where he received his doctorate in 1970. At the invitation of Clifford Geertz , who conducted field research in the small Moroccan town of Sefrou from 1963 , Rabinow investigated the Sufi brotherhood of the 17th century Islamic local saint from 1968-69 in the nearby village of Sidi Lahcen Lyusi . In 1974 he received an associate professor at the City University of New York , from 1983 he was a full professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was also the recipient of numerous international academic honors and visiting professorships. Rabinow died in April 2021 at the age of 76.

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Central to Paul Rabinow's work is his definition of anthropology as anthropos + logos . According to this definition, it is the task of anthropology to investigate how the mutually productive relationships between knowledge , thought, and care are formed within changeable power relationships. Since around 2007 Rabinow has been pursuing an approach he has developed, which he calls the anthropology of the contemporary and which is intended to take account of the problem that the present also becomes the past.

Rabinow was known for his conceptual work under the influence of French, German and American thought traditions. He was an important interlocutor to Michel Foucault, whose work he edited, interpreted and also transferred to new areas or updated.

In his work, Rabinow was always concerned with developing and practicing new forms of research, writing and ethics for the human sciences . According to Rabinow, the currently prevailing practices of knowledge production, institutions and also places for understanding human-scientific problems of the 21st century are institutionally and epistemologically inadequate. Rabinow therefore developed methods of experimentation and collaboration that consisted of conceptual work and case-related research.

Conceptual work

Rabinow's conceptual work differs from the way of working, which is more widespread in the social sciences, which tests abstract theories or philosophical theorems on concrete examples. Instead, Rabinow wanted - similar to the German history of concepts - to approach his research subjects using the terms they describe. Conceptual work opens up research to and encounters concrete features of certain cases, whereas timeless or universal theories lose sight of peculiarities and singularities. By conceptual work, Rabinow understands the construction, elaboration and testing of a conceptual inventory as well as the specification of and experimentation with multi-dimensional diagnostic and analytical frameworks. In this regard, Rabinow's work continues a social science tradition from Max Weber to Clifford Geertz with adaptations to its subject.

Rabinow emphasized that terms are tools that are developed for specific problems and are calibrated to the production of pragmatic results, both analytical and ethical. As such, terms would have to be adapted to the different structures of problem areas. Conceptual work includes archaeological, genealogical and diagnostic dimensions. In the field of archeology, conceptual work involves examining and defining concepts as part of an earlier discourse .

Genealogical concept work liberates the concepts from their field of appearance by showing the contingent history of their selection and development, as well as their potential contemporary meaning. Diagnostic concept work has a function of criticism: it tests the suitability of a concept or a repertoire of concepts for new problems and purposes.

Anthropology of the Contemporary

As a research method, Rabinow delimited the anthropology of the contemporary from Foucault's history of the present . This history of the present, according to Rabinow, consists in formulating an understanding of the past as a means that shows the contingency of the present and thus contributes to a more open future. Rabinow defined the contemporary as a (re-) accumulation of both old and new elements and their interactions and contact surfaces. This means that contemporary research questions and objects are emergent and therefore contingent.

This emergence describes a state in which different elements mix and produce a structure, the meaning of which cannot be reduced to previous elements and relationships (it is therefore more than the sum of its parts). It follows from this that the history of the present cannot adequately describe the contingent contemporary by definition .

Rabinow described the contemporary as a temporal and ontological problem area. In Marking Time (2007) he differentiates between two different meanings of the contemporary. First, to be contemporary means to exist as something else at the same time. This meaning has temporal, but no historical, connotations. The second meaning of the contemporary, however, has both temporal and historical dimensions, and it is this meaning that played a large role in Rabinow's work. He understood the contemporary as a "moving ratio" . Just as “the modern” can be understood as a moving relationship between tradition and modernity, the contemporary is a moving relationship between modernity that moves through the recent past and the near future in a (non-linear) space ( “a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (non-linear) space ").

As such, the anthropology of the contemporary consists of analytical work that helps to design research approaches for underdetermined, emergent and inconsistent conditions. She wants to develop methods, practices and forms of elicitation possibilities and narration that can describe the mode (or modes) of anthropos as figure and structure.

Investigations in the contemporary are both analytical and synthetic . They are analytical insofar as they break down and specify webs of relationships. They are synthetic where they put these relationships back together and give them new forms. In this sense, work on the contemporary falls into an area of ​​analytical consideration that connects the recent past with the near future and the near future with the recent past.

Anthropos as a problem

Rabinow's work on the anthropology of the contemporary was formally determined by his diagnosis of anthropos (Greek: "the human thing") as a problem of thought, tools, and places in which science is carried out. Rabinow describes man (anthropos) as the being who suffers from a large number of heterogeneous truths of himself (man as hetero-logoi ). Research and narrative models should be developed with this inevitable fact in mind (the “unnavoidable fact that anthropos is that being who suffers from too many logoi”) .

From this it follows that models of thought are necessary that not only open up new possibilities, but also transform claims to truth into practices of ethical life in order to ask the question “What is anthropos today?”. Rabinow said that people today need possibilities (equipment) to convert logos into ethos . Michel Foucault had pointed out that in ancient thought the imperative “know yourself” was connected with the imperative of “concern for yourself” and was based on it. Taking up this idea, Rabinow formulated the challenge of inventing equipment that takes today's ethical and scientific problems into account. These would be contemporary tools.

If the challenge of contemporary facilities (equipment) is to develop conceptual models as ethical practices, this also includes the localities where such a formation is possible to design (again). Rabinow dealt directly with the question of how and where equipment is put together in Synthetic Anthropos (with Gaymon Bennet, 2009).

New places for science

Following on from existing university structures, Rabinow has dealt extensively with the development of new places of science and has described the university's disciplinary organization and its career patterns as a major hindrance to thinking in the 21st century. Rabinow called for more flexible science locations for the social sciences and humanities that can keep pace with technical developments. According to Rabinow, the Internet offers opportunities for more flexible science. He himself was involved in the development of two potential new science venues: the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) .

Collective work

An important element of the science places that Rabinow demanded is collective work. Rabinow clearly distinguishes collective work from collaboration. Cooperation, according to Rabinow, is defined work on individual problems with occasional or regular exchange. Collaboration does not contain a common definition of problems, nor does it contain shared teaching techniques. Collective work, on the other hand, assumes an interdependent division of work on common problems. For Rabinow, collective work is the appropriate way of working in contemporary anthropology.

Works (selection)

  • Symbolic domination. Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1975
  • As an ethnologist in Morocco. Piet Meyer Verlag, Bern / Vienna, 2020, ISBN 978-3-905799-58-3 .
  • Michel Foucault. Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Athenaeum, Frankfurt / Main, 1987, ISBN 3-89547-050-3 . Orig. 1983 (edited with Hubert Dreyfus).
  • Anthropology of Reason: Studies on Science and Lifestyle. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main, 2004, ISBN 3-518-29246-3 . Orig. 1997.
  • What is anthropology? Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main, 2004, ISBN 3-518-29287-0 . Orig. 2003.
  • Marking time. On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008, ISBN 0-691-13363-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Rabinow Obituary. In: Tribute Archive. Accessed April 11, 2021 .
  2. ^ Paul Rabinow: Short Vitae. (pdf; 42 kB) In: Website of the Anthropology Department at UC Berkeley. November 26, 2007, archived from the original on June 10, 2010 ; accessed on April 11, 2021 .
  3. ^ A b Paul Rabinow, Gaymon Bennett: Toward Synthetic Anthropos: Remediating Concepts.
  4. ^ Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus: Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics , Frankfurt / Main: Athenaeum, 1987.
  5. ↑ Michel Foucault: Archeology of Knowledge. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, 1981 (French: L'Archéologie du savoir , 1969).
  6. ↑ Michel Foucault: Nietzsche, the Genealogy and the History. In: Ders .: Writings in four volumes. Dits et Ecrits, Vol. II 1970-1975. Edited by Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Frankfurt / Main 2002, pp. 166–191.
  7. ↑ Anthropology of Reason. Studies in science and lifestyle. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt / Main 1997.
  8. ↑ Paul Rabinow, Gaymon Bennett: From Bio-Ethics to human practices, or Assembling Contemporary equipment. In: Beatriz da Costa, Kavita Philip (ed.): Tactical Biopolitics. Art, Activism, and Technoscience. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
  9. ^ Paul Rabinow: Marking Time. On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007.
  10. ^ A b Paul Rabinow: Anthropos Today. Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003.
  11. ↑ Michel Foucault: Hermeneutics of the subject. Lectures at the Collège de France (1981/82). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main, 2009.
  12. ↑ Paul Rabinow, Gaymon Bennett: human practices. Interfacing Three Modes of Collaboration. In: Mark A. Bedau, Carol E. Cleland (Eds.): The Prospect of Protocells. Social and Ethical Implications of Recreating Life. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
personal data
SURNAME Rabinow, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1944
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 2021