"Essays on the Anthropology of Reason will provide an important sense of
the solidity of research in the new and exciting terrains that
anthropology has entered. In so doing, it will remove discussion of such
new work from the celebrity/fashion circuit' of recent trends in
cultural studies. Paul Rabinow's collection both illuminates and extends
a major research career that has never waned in the power of its
intellect, curiosity, and depth of achievement." George E. Marcus, Rice
UniversityThis collection of essays explains and encourages new
reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the
West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality,
emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show
how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices,
hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus
on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of
molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature.
This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how
scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in
terms of power.The topics include how French socialist urban planning in
the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning;
how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome
Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and
how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life
required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred.
Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase
chain reaction which enables the rapid production ofspecific sequences
of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in
dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity,
on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and
natural sciences.
