Sentiment and pragmatics in Teheran
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Category: English
Law, society, and the anthropology of noncontemporaneous contemporary
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
The work of uncertainty: Relational aesthetics in contemporary Iran
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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. This principle sustains the practice of problematization, or the delineation of zones of inquiry in terms…
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 to assemblages therefore brings a distinctive temporality into view. Attending to this temp…
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 be seen in the crucible of experience and experimentation (foyer d’expérience) know…
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 one where hopefulness entwines with worrisome, oppressive realities that pervade biosocial trends concerning race. Genetic ancestry testing, forensic uses of DNA…
Forgiveness as a technology of the state
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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 of the present day. The role of the anthropologist is neither that …
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 theme of “experiments in form” is explored and the question of the value of a life of …
But beautiful …
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
We are unhousing people and so are obliged to rehouse them: The moral economy of squatting
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Ethics and the spacetime discontinuum
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
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 modernity as an ethos.
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 never in the same place for any length of time.
Empathy, solidarity, and the work of law and humanitarianism
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Tools for an efficient witness: Deskilling science and devaluing labor at an agro-environmental research institute
Expectations that research should not only generate real-world impacts but do so in a way that provides “value-for-money” pervade academia and the contemporary knowledge economy. In agricultural research for development, this imperative has spawned “to…
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 the evolution and range of the topics and problems Rabinow investigated, and the diverse projects of anthr…
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 inequalities frame the possibilities and outcomes of fieldwork. It also reflects on the ways in which bo…
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. It offers a vantage on the sweep of his work as it is addressed by the …
“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 fundamental crisis of mis/under-representing being-ND-in-the-world. I begin with a critique of anthropological ethics at large, disen…
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 priestess Khady Fall. Questioning the psychic separation of the modern subject, I contend that cultures with a spirit idio…
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 theorizations of the ways humans and animals differ. The divergent roles assigned to gesture in human communicatio…
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 freedom, defined as the tool of consciousness that enables people to reflect on themselves and their circumstances, and make decisions about what they ought to do. The be…
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) are a constant threat, causing illness and death to those who arouse their envy or ire. While some women are widely known…