Paul Rabinow

Paul Rabinow was an American anthropologist, born in Florida in 1944, who spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. A close collaborator and interpreter of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, he developed what he called an anthropology of reason and an anthropology of the contemporary, distinguishing his approach from Foucault's own history of the present and treating the human, or anthropos, as a problem requiring new methods of inquiry. He directed the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory and served as director of human practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center; his doctoral advisor at the University of Chicago was Clifford Geertz. He died in Berkeley in 2021.