The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary

by Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault

 

In this culmination of his search for anthropological concepts and practices appropriate to the twenty-first century, Paul Rabinow contends that to make sense of the contemporary anthropologists must invent new forms of inquiry. He begins with an extended rumination on what he gained from two of his formative Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz. Reflecting on their lives as teachers and thinkers, as well as human beings, he poses questions about their critical limitations, unfulfilled hopes, and the lessons he learned from and with them.

 

This spirit of collaboration animates The Accompaniment , as Rabinow assesses the last ten years of his career, largely spent engaging in a series of intensive experiments in collaborative research and often focused on cutting-edge work in synthetic biology. He candidly details the successes and failures of shifting his teaching practice away from individual projects, placing greater emphasis on participation over observation in research, and designing and using websites as a venue for collaboration. Analyzing these endeavors alongside his efforts to apply an anthropological lens to the natural sciences, Rabinow lays the foundation for an ethically grounded anthropology ready and able to face the challenges of our contemporary world.

Genres: Anthropology

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reflections on the contemporary, but above all an extended defense of the reflexivization into the practice of ethnography of Geertz's observation that it is impossible to distinguish between the mode of representation and the substantive content of a representation. Thus the participant observer, once accepted into the group, becomes indistinguishable from that group, and must himself by the object of representation -- I-witnessing, one might call it.

This leads to a great deal of practical insight about traditional practices of ethnography (recounted via acidulous reminiscences of his time among the great anthropologists and sociologists of the 1970s: Foucault, Geertz, Bellah, Bourdieu, etc.) but somewhat pathetic encounters in the field. The bioscientists Rabinow investigates in the second half of the book condescend to name Rabinow as "co-primary investigator" but then proceed to ignore and exclude him. Rabinow muses on for pages about why he is getting treated this way and how he should respond, without ever quite getting to the main issue, which is that the bioscientists in fact do not consider him a peer, no matter what his title or the grant proposals may suggest to the contrary. Why don't they? Well, he observes a lot of detail about HOW they exclude and ignore him, using the formal devices of impersonal scientistic modes of presentation, but the bottom line on WHY is much simpler: they're looking to invent practical objects, and aren't interested in those who can't help them directly in this material end, much less someone who wishes to ask awkward questions about whether the practices they are engaged in really are wise ones. The moral and philosophical inadequacies of their positions are irrelevant to them, and in the end we are left with not much more than the classic contrast between the thinker and the man of action, with the unoriginal forms of mutual contempt that these two groups invariably display.

[Rohnda Maree · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellant