Paul Rabinow

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

To Rabinows influential works include Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics ( with Hubert Dreyfus, 1983, German 1987), anthropology of reason. Studies of science and life (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 in the Moroccan town of Sefrou did field research in 1963, examined Rabinow 1968-69 in the nearby village of Sidi Lahcen Lyusi the Sufi brotherhood of the same Islamic local saint from the 17th century. In 1974, he received an associate professor at the City University of New York, he is since 1983 Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the recipient of several international academic honors and visiting professorships.

Work

Central in the work of Paul Rabinows is his definition of anthropology as anthropos logos. According to this definition, it is to examine the role of anthropology as the mutually productive relationships between knowledge, thought and care form within changing power relations. Since around 2007 Rabinow takes a he developed approach, which he calls the anthropology of the contemporary and should take account of the problem that even the present to the past is.

Rabinow is known for the concept of work under the influence of French, German and American traditions of thought. He was a key interlocutor with Michel Foucault, whose work he edited, interpreted and transferred to new areas or updated.

In his works, Rabinow has always busy to develop new forms of research, writing, and an ethic for the human sciences and practice. The currently prevailing practices of knowledge production, institutions and places for understanding human scientific problems of the 21st century were so Rabinow, institutionally and epistemologically inadequate. Rabinow has developed methods of experimentation and collaboration, which consist of term work and case-based research.

Term work

Rabinows term work differs from that in the social sciences more widespread operation that tests abstract theories or philosophical theorems to concrete examples. Instead Rabinow wants - like the German conceptual history - to approach his research subjects about the concepts they describe. Term work inside the research for and push her to specific characteristics of certain cases, whereas timeless or universal theories lose particularities and singularities from view. Under term work Rabinow understands constructing, finishing and testing a conceptual inventory as well as the specification of and experimentation with multi-dimensional diagnostic and analytical framework. In this regard Rabinows work continues a social science tradition of Max Weber, Clifford Geertz up with adjustments to its object.

Rabinow emphasizes that concepts are tools that are developed for specific problems and are calibrated to the production of pragmatic results, both analytical and ethical nature. As such concepts must be adapted to the different structures of problem areas. Term work includes archaeological, genealogical and diagnostic dimensions. In the field of archeology term work includes examining and determining terms as part of a previous discourse. Genealogical term labor freed the terms of their appearance field by demonstrating the contingent history of their selection and formation, as well as their potential contemporary significance. The diagnostic term work has a function of criticism: It tests the suitability of a term or a phrase repertoire for new problems and purposes.

Anthropology of the Contemporary

As a research method Rabinow demarcates the anthropology of the contemporary of Foucault's history of the present. This history of the present, as Rabinow, is to formulate an understanding of the past as a means of showing the contingency of the present, and thereby contribute to a more open future. Rabinow now defined as the Contemporary (re - ) collection of old as well as new elements and their interactions and contact surfaces. This means that contemporary research questions and emergent objects and are therefore contingent. This emergence is a condition in which mix different elements and produce a structure whose meaning can not be reduced to previous elements and relationships (ie, it is more than the sum of its parts) .. It follows that the history of the presence of the by definition contingent Contemporary can not adequately describe.

The Contemporary referred Rabinow as a temporal and ontological problem space. In Marking Time ( 2007), he distinguishes between two different meanings of the contemporary. First is contemporary to be at the same time to exist as something else. This is the significance of time, but no historical connotations. However, the second meaning of the contemporary are both temporal and historical dimensions, and this meaning is to play a major role in Rabinows work. He understands the contemporary as " mobile money" ( "moving ratio" ). Can be just as " the Modern " understood as a movable between tradition and modernity, the Contemporary is a moving relationship between modernity, moving through the recent past and 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, there is the anthropology of the contemporary analytic work that helps to design research approaches for underdetermined, emergent and inconsistent conditions. You will develop methods, practices and forms of survey opportunities and narration that the mode ( or modes ) of the anthropos can describe as a character and structure.

Studies in Contemporary are both analytically and synthetically. They are analytical in the sense that they decompose and specify networks of relationships. Synthetic they are where they put together these relationships again and give them new forms. In this sense, work falls on an area in contemporary analytical approach which links the recent past to the near future and the near future with the recent past.

Anthropos as a problem

Rabinows work on the anthropology of the contemporary was formally of his diagnosis of anthropos (Greek: " the human thing" ) as a problem of thinking, the tools and the places in which science operates. Rabinow describes man ( anthropos ) as the being who suffers from a large number of heterogeneous truths of himself ( Man as hetero - logoi ). Research and Narrationsmodelle need to be developed with a view to this inevitable fact (the " unnavoidable factthat anthropos is did being who suffers from too many logoi ").

It follows that conceptual models are needed that not only open up new opportunities, but also claims to truth in practices of ethical life transform to the question "What is anthropos today? " to ask. Rabinow says that man need today options ( "equipment " ) to convert logos into ethos. Michel Foucault has pointed out that in ancient thought of the imperative with the imperatives of " care of the self " was " Detect yourself " Taking up and extending orientierte.Diesen thought of him Rabinow has formulated the challenge of working equipment ( "equipment " ) to invent, meet today's ethical and scientific problems into consideration. This would be contemporary attachments.

If the challenge of contemporary equipment ( "equipment " ) is to develop mental models as ethical practices, this also includes the localities in which such a formation is possible to (re) design. Immediately the question of how and where the collection of equipment done to Rabinow deals in Synthetic Anthropos ( with Gaymon Bennett, 2009).

New locations for science

Rabinow has, then, thoroughly preoccupied to existing university structures with the development of new science places and the disciplinary organization of the university and their career patterns described as a great handicap of thinking in the 21st century. Rabinow calls for more flexible science places for the social sciences and humanities that can keep pace with technological developments. Opportunities for more flexible science offers by Rabinow the Internet. He himself is involved in the development of two possible new science centers: The Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC ) and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center ( SynBERC ).

Collective labor

An important element of science places that calls Rabinow, is the collective work. Rabinow distinguishes collective work decided by cooperation. Cooperation, Rabinow, was demarcated work on individual problems with occasional or regular contact. Cooperation contains neither a common definition of problems, yet shared techniques of teaching. Collective work, however, is based on an interdependent division of work on common problems. Collective work is the appropriate mode of operation for the anthropology of the presence of Rabinow.

Works (selection)

• Symbolic Domination. Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1975
• Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 1977 ( as google book)
• Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Frankfurt / Main: Atheneum, 1987, Orig 1983 ( ed. with Hubert Dreyfus ).
• Anthropology of reason. Studies of science and life, Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 2004 Orig 1997.
• What is anthropology, Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 2004 Orig 2003.
• Marking Time. On the Anthropology of the Contemporary, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.