Paul Rabinow

0:09:07 Born in 1944 on an American army base in Florida where his father was stationed but raised in New York City; my parents thought my first word had a southern accent, and since they detested the American South (racism, anti-Semitism, bigotry) they sent my mother back to New York. I did not know my grandparents; I was one of those cosmopolitan New York, 100% non-religious, 100% Jews, cut off from my past but rooted in NYC; my grandparents emigrated from various parts of the Russian Empire and came to the States in the 1890's; I have heard some stories about them but nothing in any great detail; my father's family settled in upstate New York and my mother's family was in New York City; I have felt no great desire to search for my proverbial roots; feel very settled about my identity. My wife, Marilyn, is a Chinese-American Californian and we have a son, Marc, who is now at New York University; he identifies as Californian, Chinese-American, Jewish-American. More of the ancestral complexity and perplexity arises more for him than anything I have ever felt; his maternal grandparents are in San Francisco so he has more of a connection with the Chinese-American side than to the New York side although he is now living in New York.

3:37:00 Both of my parents were psychoanalytically oriented social workers; my mother worked in various institutions but essentially was socially committed and active; my father worked first for the Veterans' Administration after World War II and later for an organization called the Jewish Childcare Association; I have never been interested in psychoanalysis; I didn't believe in it and, as an adolescent, thought it hypocritical; inward looking depth analysis by itself has never been my interest; my parents were strongly anti-Communist although they were leftists, so I grew up with foundation myths that on the one hand in our neighbourhood, Sunnyside in the borough of Queens, which was a garden city, where Lewis Mumford lived, was a mix of socialists and communists (among others), with the communists apparently being somewhat higher up in social class; the two founding experiences, one before my birth was the Hitler-Stalin pact in which the Daily Worker ceased publication for a week because they simply didn't know what the party line was yet; my parents repeated this story to me many times as a reason for why they didn't trust communists; the other experience was McCarthyism in the 1950's in New York, an atmosphere of fear, not personal but a general mood; then, I am told, many communists moved out of the city to the wealthier suburbs and became bourgeois as a protection against firings; these stories were a central part of my political formation which I still adhere to; I have never been a Marxist although I locate myself on the left; my parents were also simultaneously completely Jewish-identified but not religious - I did not have a Bar Mitzvah - and was raised anti-Zionist but always aware of how much anti-Semitism there still is (something I witnessed in Morocco and France); so I had a mixed combination of strongly held standards and attachments, but not connected to big movements; maybe New York City is the core of that; I have challenged many things in my life, but those orientations still stand.

8:13:11 I was brought up to believe that America was simultaneously probably the best place in the world to be for a Jew but also not very trustworthy and not very safe; I was of America but not fully American; my parents’ experience in the South and Midwest, when my father was in the army, of blatant racism and anti-Semitism was foundational; he was a lieutenant and in Kansas my parents were obliged to find housing off base landing in the house of a woman who was a blatant anti-Semite; since there was no other place to live they never broached it with her until they left; she had never met a Jew; this sort of dépaysement with which I was raised and which I accepted, is certainly one of the roots of why I became an anthropologist and why I continue in many ways to identify with being an anthropologist, even if my anthropology is a bit unorthodox; personally and existentially that's the connection; I am a citizen of the world but don't totally belong anywhere; the only places I feel at home are New York and Paris; even though I have lived in California for thirty years, it is not the same; I agree with the feeling expressed by Simon Schaffer of the Jew as outsider, but in New York City as there were so many secular Jews and there were so many kids in many ways like me; I went to Stuyvesant High School, a public high school for science and math, in the late 1950's; there was a city wide competition for the two of these in New York City; at the time it was 90% Jewish, now it is much more mixed, so I was always with several of my friends from the neighbourhood and I still know people I grew up with, which is very unusual in America; the school was in Manhattan and I went to school on the subway; therefore the urban experience was strong; For reasons that I don't fully understand, since my youth I have been attracted to Paris and things French more generally; it has formed an important part of my life; when I speak French something changes in me; France is a sort of second home though I am clearly an outsider there, and have always felt that I was an American in Paris which was an excellent place to be; during the Vietnam War I was certainly not going to serve in the United States army; at the time there were still deferments from the military for people who were attending a university; I was at the very edge of the time where I could be drafted as I got my PhD when I was very young; I considered leaving the United States at that point; considered going to France, in other words, fortunately the final deferment came through and I stayed in the States; my attachments are still to France rather than anywhere else although they have weakened in recent years as the French intellectual scene is a pale reflection of earlier days; combination of philosophical and intellectual connections which in the 1950's and 1960's were very distinctive and strong, without comparable traditions either in the States or England; Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, also people like Jean Lacouture and other journalists from 'Le Monde'; then a certain form of sociability, conversation and elegance in Paris; the connection to the larger colonial world, global politics, literature, cinema, was unabashedly present in France and was not in the United States; beyond that I don't really know, except that I have always been comfortable there; people understand my French because I know what is going on with them - an anthropological dimension; we raised our son bilingually in Berkeley; my wife, Marilyn, speaks better French than I do; over the last years the intellectual dimension has diminished as the philosophic and scientific scenes in Paris are now rather dismal; French molecular biology is not at the competitive scale of the States or England; they know it and it is hard for them; philosophically there is not much going on and it is the same for anthropology, which has stayed rather traditional and dominated by Levi-Strauss.

21:54:07 I went to Morocco because of Clifford Geertz; I was originally interested in studying Buddhism and had done a lot of work with Mircea Eliade on the history of religion, and with Nur Yalman and Barney Cohn; for a variety of reasons, various places that seemed possible fieldwork sites closed down politically for a while; then Geertz suggested Morocco; of course I had a political and intellectual connection to Algeria and to French colonialism, but I did not know much about Morocco per se; on religious belief - don't believe in God; there are passages in Levi-Strauss’ 'Tristes Tropiques' on Buddhism which are relatively close to what I felt much more strongly as a younger person; this question is interesting because in recent years I have been working with a student who has just finished a degree in theology and is now doing a degree in anthropology; he is a practising Christian and we get along remarkably well, discussing ethics etc., but it is clear that the larger theist dimensions are radically disparate; this is an interesting anthropological dimension where ethically this seems to not cause any problem; I frequently related to people with strong but quiet religious beliefs; Michel de Certeau was a Jesuit and I had a number of other Jesuit friends; I think it is the fact that they care about the world and other people, are thoughtful, committed and concerned, and I don't have to share other parts of their belief system while finding them worthy of friendship; I am uninterested in the Dawkins' argument of science disproving religion, I am not a positivist, there is a big difference between this form of nineteenth century militant positivism and a Weberian position in which science does not answer ultimate questions; when science becomes a world view, a cosmology, it seems to part company with its deep critical functions; I may not be a believer or theist, but I am not a militant atheist; I also part company with people like Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor who feel that unless we have sure foundations for our ethical life that we flounder, which seems wrong; no one has ever proved the ultimate foundations of anything to everyone's satisfaction yet ethical life and decent human relations seem to me not all that common, but not impossible either; I am not looking for ultimate stopping points, and there is some anthropological dimension to that through respect for the complexity of different commitments; cosmopolitan enlightenment sense that we have to live with difference which can be a good thing, and that intolerance –even in the name of tolerance -- is not so admirable.

29:40:14 As a child I was passionately involved in sports, roller hockey in particular; a strange obsession as it was mainly played by Irish Catholics and the Jews played basketball; I was the only Jew in a Catholic Youth Organization league; meant I was outside home a lot as we went to urban parks to play; later I was a swimmer and a runner; fairly early I was interested in literature; I found mathematics easy when young but by high school found that I was not particularly good at it at the world class level; I liked exploring the city; school was easy and boring so had interests outside the institution; there were books in the house; classical music was always important to me, I couldn't live without Bach; this morning I was listening to Rameau (wonderful interpretation by Alexandre Tharaud) and find music deeply important and satisfying; in 'Tristes Tropiques', Levi-Strauss talks about wandering through Brazil with Chopin and Wagner in his head; there is something that is not discursive, that produces beauty and harmony, and I often do write with music; find it spiritual and a great solace; other arts are important to me, architecture in particular, also modern dance; I was obliged to play the clarinet but was not gifted; one of the things that happened in the United States in the last few decades has been the big separation between private and public schools, and the general decline in the public school system; that was not the case when I was at high school; in this all boys school I had many good teachers and I really enjoyed learning; there was no stigma to just being smart; we had good literature teachers; that was a great take-off point for me; then the University of Chicago was just a wonderful expansion of learning; my mother had wanted me to stay in New York and go to Columbia but when I met some people from the University of Chicago I knew instantly that I had to go there; it was the right decision; Stuyvesant High School and then Chicago were both deeply rewarding and formative for me; many people simply don't have the joy of having encountered that form of learning. I am very grateful to both those institutions; at Stuyvesant it was more a general mood that affected me; we had some old maths teachers who would tell us that one of us would solve Fermat's theorem, which was considered the ultimate thing human beings could do; at Chicago the so-called Hutchins College curriculum was still in existence and was tremendously rewarding for me; the main influence was Richard McKeon, a great Aristotle specialist, a broad thinker and a great if scary teacher; McKeon taught a basic three term sequence on the philosophical underpinning of all knowledge: one term on the physical sciences, one on the social sciences, and one on the humanities - Aristotle provided distinctions between them; this framework continues to be powerful and insightful for me; at the University of Chicago you could take entrance exams and I placed out of all the sciences and math requirements; I did take a little more math but never took bioscience in college, so this turn to molecular biology later in life in a way came out of the blue, but I have never been intimidated by science; McKeon's philosophy was neither analytic nor continental, but a strange mix of classically based, very large perspective on all thinking, which was very enabling, and still is; McKeon was certainly the major intellectual influence; his son, Michael, is now quite a well-known historian of the novel; McKeon was in some ways like Foucault, there was not a warm relationship, which was in many ways freeing because it wasn't personal; I could flourish with this, as I did with Foucault; they were both complicated men and I was ultimately comfortable with that as it provided both challenge and distance.

42:37:02 As an undergraduate at Chicago, Nur Yalman took me under his wing; he was avuncular and supportive; the social science world included Geertz and Barney Cohn, but they were a bit more distant; Yalman was important as I was interested in structuralism at that point, he was personally generous with his time; he connected me to anthropology; the anthropology department was a very distinguished place which meant among other things that they didn't teach very much; I was interested in Indian civilization - McKim Marriott and Milton Singer, Yalman and Cohn; as an undergraduate I took the basic courses in anthropology and since the department was not offering many courses, Yalman got me permission to take the basic graduate sequence; then I persuaded them that since I took the exams at the end of the year and I came out first (in a blind scoring), I was finished with my doctoral exams as an undergraduate; hence it made sense to go to graduate school in Chicago; anthropology offered me intellectual depth, staying within the university, exoticism and challenge, and a lot of smart people doing exciting things; actually I was the first undergraduate from the college to be admitted to graduate school at Chicago; we made a deal that if I went to Paris for a year I could come back to graduate school; in Paris I listened to the seminars and lectures of Levi-Strauss and Louis Dumont; went back to Chicago and was tentatively thinking of becoming a physical anthropologist; Clark Howell kindly suggested he didn't think I had the temperament (“you may never find a bone”) Geertz asked if I wanted to go to Morocco and off I went; I maintained a strong connection with the College and McKeon and that type of thinking throughout graduate school, so I have never been full socialized in anthropology, which may explain some of the things that I have done.

47:39:19 Levi-Strauss was extremely fond of (and kind to) young Americans; in 1965 his seminar had two hundred and fifty people in it, and he was extremely nasty to most of them but very kind to the three young Americans; several times he came through Chicago; I talked to him but he was not the kind of person you chatted with; Dumont was a much more complicated figure; his seminar had four people in it; he was very bitter about this; the course was a kinship course; I was young, when I introduced myself, he gave me a two hour lecture on why understanding the Nazis as a pathology of the West (basically 'Homo Hierarchicus) had motivated his thought, and his problem with trying to explain the West, and a good deal about his life; unfortunately the four students consisted of two Tamil specialists, a young Scot and myself; the seminar developed into a discussion of Tamil kinship terminology and the two youth disappeared; Dumont was very grumpy about this and told David Schneider that I was not a nice person; several years later at a New Year's Eve Mozart concert in Carnegie Hall on a beautiful snowy evening at midnight, saw Dumont and greeted him; at first he ignored me but his wife encouraged him to shake hands and I was forgiven; saw him at Chicago several times after that; I actually think that his thought and work is extremely important and in some ways, more complicated and interesting than Levi-Strauss's; I also went to several philosophy lectures at the College de France, such as Jean Hyppolite on Hegel, so I was introduced to a tradition which played out later to the work that I did.

51:56:06 Clifford Geertz was not a warm human being, and even less so in the 1960's; my personal contact with him was minimal, it was intellectual but not much else; he facilitated things for me, there was a young Moroccan who taught us some Moroccan Arabic, but basically I was on my own; I flew into Rabat and my first experience in Morocco was astonishment at the beauty of Rabat and it’s art deco Ville Nouvelle which nobody in the literature had talked about; the main thing was how difficult Arabic was; Morocco itself was difficult and a testing experience in many ways; I would never say that I became deeply enamoured or engaged with Morocco; Clifford Geertz was in the city and pretty much absent; his wife Hildred was more accessible and helpful, but I did not have a big connection there either; I wanted to be an anthropologist and do something like that, I did it, but knew that I did not want to do that again; probably I should have gone to Fez and lived there rather than the countryside and I think my experience would have been richer, though whether that would have ultimately changed things, I don't know; I wrote 'Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco' partly because of 'Tristes Tropiques' as that was one of the vectors that brought me into anthropology; then the experience of fieldwork itself was troubling, confusing and lonely; I was interested in the question of what kind of knowledge is anthropological knowledge, and what it was that I was learning, which seemed to be one of the important dimensions of what was going on; the real structure of the book follows Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit', an unfolding of knowledge in various stages; people read it as a personal book which in many ways it is; its intent was an attempt to stay sane, figuring out what I had been going through, and did I want to continue to do this; I wrote it very quickly after finishing my thesis; I wrote it in about a month; Cliff hated it and told me it would ruin my career, it was rejected by six presses; I had almost given up when Robert Bellah got it published by the University of California Press; it is still in print thirty years later; Ernest Gellner worked in Morocco and the first book review I ever had was a full page in the TLS attacking my book 'Symbolic Domination'; I called Cliff, thinking this was terrible, but he and everybody else said it was the best thing that could have happened; Gellner no doubt thought me to be in his debt so had attacked me publicly in an important place; later when he came to Berkeley he did seem to consider me in his debt; I took him out to lunch and we talked; that was perfectly cordial although later he got nasty again; I came to Cambridge once but he didn't come to my lecture; I thought his book 'Saints of the Atlas' very British, more about British anthropology than about Morocco; Jacques Berque and some other French anthropologists who had studied some of those regions in detail had different views of how the tribes worked; like a lot of good anthropology it was a demonstration of a certain analytic tradition rather than ultimately being about Morocco.

Second Part

0:09:07 In 1971, after Morocco and the subsequent book on fieldwork, I had a position in New York; at the time there were lots of jobs around; I had written my thesis in New York living three houses down from Auden; I took a job at an experimental school in New York City as part of the City University without thinking about it very much; I then spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study which turned out to be quite a momentous year; I had very little to do with Cliff, but Robert Bellah was there; it was a complicated and tragic year for him as they had proposed him for a professorship there but the mathematicians and others turned it down; also one of his daughters committed suicide; he was friendly, and it turned out to be an important avenue of development for me; also, Pierre Bourdieu was there that year; at first he did not speak English very well and we spent an enormous amount of time together talking; he outlined in great detail how he was going to get into the College de France, and the entire sociology of the French field; he did exactly what he said he was going to do, and it worked out in the way he said it would; that was the next wave of French connection after Dumont; I then went back to New York and the fiscal crisis hit; what had been an experimental school, and fun, stopped being experimental and was no longer fun; Bellah ran a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in Berkeley and he accepted me as a participant; that was a major turning point, Bellah helped me get “Reflections” published, I met Hubert Dreyfus, and a whole range of other connections opened up; I discovered California, which seemed an exotic land; that led into my learning from Dreyfus about Heidegger and Wittgenstein; that set the scene for the entry of Foucault into the picture; I got a job at Berkeley; they wanted a Chicago anthropologist so I was competing against several of my classmates.

5:21:19 Unlike Dumont, Bourdieu was an overtly passionate and direct person; he also demanded a loyalty which after a while became a bit of an issue; I compare him to the protagonists in Flaubert's 'Sentimental Education' or Stendhal’s 'The Red and The Black', a self-styled provincial who mythologized his marginality, comes to Paris, fights his way to the top, and becomes increasingly unhappy; an extremely intense and brilliant character but one who obsessively desired power and recognition, and was overtly plotting and strategizing to achieve it; having achieved it, there was always more, and like the protagonists in many French novels, having reached the summit was still not happy; increasingly in his later years when he become militantly political, I saw him less and did not agree with his politics or his approach to intellectual life; would always assume that he was right and everybody else, wrong; on Edmund Leach - there was a Wenner-Gren conference in Fez; we were in a luxurious setting overlooking Fez; among the distinguished people were Leach, Geertz, Sahlins, and a range of younger people; Geertz and Sahlins fought with each other and by the second day Leach, who was obviously ill, turned his back to the table, gazed out over Fez, read the newspaper, and interjected from time to time that it was “all rubbish”; no one knew what to do so we ignored it; then Sherry Ortner tried to mediate this impossible situation and everyone then turned on her; it was a difficult event.

10:12:12 When I went to California as a professor in 1978, I had heard of Foucault before but had never been very interested in his work; Dreyfus, John Searle and I talked a lot and in my first year at Berkeley, Dreyfus and Searle were giving a seminar on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida; Dreyfus and Searle interpreted Foucault as a structuralist which I didn't think was correct; Dreyfus and I discussed the issue at length and decided to write an article together, I began to convince him that what he said should be nuanced; at that point someone mentioned that Foucault was coming to Stanford (near Berkeley) to give a lecture; I suggested calling him and asking him to talk with us; Foucault agreed and we went to fetch him; Dreyfus tape records everything that he does as he claims not to have a memory; we talked for eight hours that first day; basically, Foucault felt isolated in Paris; this is very common in France where the boundaries of who you can talk to and confide in are rigorously policed, isolating people more the higher they go; Foucault was suffering from this half-voluntary half-involuntary control; so there we were, neither Dreyfus nor I were particularly interested in Foucault’s work or had any stakes in the matter, but we thought he was confused about some things and needed to clarify his method, Foucault responded extraordinarily well; it was a gift for him to actually engage in discussion without being so guarded; he said once that if in Paris you said that you were talking about the Enlightenment, the one thing that everyone would be sure of was the Enlightenment was not the real subject; in Berkeley and in the US more generally he found the opposite is the case; the lack of Parisian sophistication pleased him, we developed a strong intellectual connection; my then wife and I became friends with Foucault and his partner, Daniel Defert, and spent a year and a half in Paris (1980-81); during this period Foucault was returning to Berkeley regularly, this lasted until his untimely death (1984); during the course of our discussions the structuralism issue fell away, and another way of putting together rigorous concept work with detailed empirical work began to be exciting to me; that is what I like about anthropology and why I am an anthropologist with philosophic interests, but very few if any philosophers combine the two; since what he and I were doing was never the same, it was possible to work alongside him and also to be independent at the same time; This was a tremendously important turning point for me; I didn't want to go back to Morocco, I was exploring the possibility of working in Vietnam; through discussions with Foucault, I began to formulate a conceptual framework which would be a kind of archaeological history of the present; I continue to think he was a great thinker but also that what he did had its limits; much of the Foucault literature I find wrong or boring, especially the British governmentality work; as the gradual publication of his lectures indicate many unexpected things continue to be opened up by Foucault; like McKeon, he was a great influence but it was always impossible for me to be a disciple, and that is the position that I want; Foucault also wanted people to govern themselves; Bourdieu wanted you to be part of his state and his party, Foucault hated that; that suited me so I have continued with that as one of the things that I do; personally, Foucault was a very unhappy, deeply private man; he was extremely kind, and very attentive to small human things; at that level he was comfortable to be around; on the other hand you always had the sense that he was somewhere else; he was quasi-suicidal during these years, deeply in the process of changing his thought, and his relationship with Daniel was not good; if you buy the argument that with Heidegger and Wittgenstein traditional Western metaphysics was over, then those people who wanted to continue to do philosophy or to lead a philosophic life had to figure out a different form; Richard Rorty tried and didn't know how to do it because most philosophers can only do traditional philosophy even though they know that that tradition is over; Foucault figured out a different way of leading the philosophic life which included a Nietzschean, but also anthropological, attention to detail; in his case art and historical archaeological detail, but he spent his life not arguing concepts with people but working through material; reading Foucault's books and some of the lectures, their engagement with detailed historical context, with options and constraints, with settings and milieu, that combination of attention to detail combined with a passion for conceptual clarification, seems to me unique; with Dumont, you knew what his theory was, similarly with Bourdieu, theory and examples; Foucault developed a very different relation between theory and examples; I know he didn't have any theory; this is in the tradition of concepts, experiments and results which then become problems; for me his was a philosophic life and, in many ways, a deeply anthropological life, always engaged outwards while thinking all the time; hence one needs to read his books, and particularly the recent lectures, as examples of experiences and experiments rather than theory or doctrine.

23:54:10 French Modern took the category “society” and nominalised it; the book showed that what was taken to be a universal category had a history- the term emerged during the cholera epidemics of the 1830's and then was involved in a long, complicated elaboration in diverse contexts; my next set of projects were suggested by George Canguilhem, the great French historian of science, the idea was to take “life” as a similar kind of concept to “society”, not as a history of ideas, but as a practice arising out of knowledge-producing venues, and to look at the emerging genomic sciences which were clearly transforming the biological understanding of what life was; to do it in detail in terms of where and how this knowledge was being produced, and how it was being circulated; that is what I have continued to do although the shift now is from life to anthropos; one way of characterising what I have been saying is that anthropos is that being who lives through logoi (speech and truth); we understand ourselves as beings who say true things about ourselves and about the way we and others live, one form of what anthropology is; currently one of the main groupings of logoi which tell us who we really are, are the biosciences; I am not interested in the truth claims per se, like Dawkins and others, but in the way that they shape us as human beings; I am currently working in synthetic biology and am interested how it and synthetic anthropos might converge in various arts and techniques which are going to in part to form how we understand ourselves, who we are, and how we will shape the environments we find ourselves in; there is a kind of long trajectory there which I believe has some coherence; I think Foucault provided tools to do a history of the present but wasn't an anthropologist, and never wrote about contemporary reality per se; the question for the rest of us is what is anthropology if not that, there are many possible answers; I am trying to articulate one version of what such a project might look like, with a combination of reflective and conceptual work with deep commitment to an empirical closeness to practices going on in the world, not just in discourse.

29:19:10 Bruno Latour has substituted one theory for another, so he and Bourdieu hated each other; Bourdieu thought the universal category was society, Latour has argued that it is actor network and there is no society; he has a single universal answer for everything that is going on; he does it brilliantly but to me it is boring because, after you know the moves, nothing new emerges; this is to a degree his mode of production; Latour worked in the Ecole des Mines for many years, very theoretical, and they would have contracts when they would do short term field work and write a report; he developed a methodology that works extremely well for that; that is one side, it is a theory and not concept work; I have respect for John Law, but like a lot of other people in science studies, has an ironic attitude towards science which I don't share; I think we are in the most exciting period of understanding living beings since Darwin; I am not looking to be distant from it but want to understand it, to protect and promote enlightenment which is under attack in the United States and in many other places, then also to think about it in a second order way; the person I am closest to in science studies is Steven Shapin; we have had very good discussions, and this book that came out a month or so ago was somewhat of a product of our discussions; book is on science and biotechnology as a vocation in the twentieth century, with a detailed study of the changing position of the scientist and their moral credibility, and how that shifted in the twentieth century - an excellent piece of work.

32:43:01 On my own anthropological work - two framing ideas; George Marcus and I have been talking for some time and have a book – Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary – with our conversations; there is a space between biological laboratories and architectural or artistic design studios in which collective criticism of individual projects had been articulated and developed; this allows something like ferocious criticism that is depersonalized and enables collective work to go forward; I think that this is one of the great inventions of the biosciences; Shapin's 'Social History of Truth' is some of it, but there is not a history of lab meetings, for instance, which I think are extremely important technology; somewhere between the human science and anthropology, in particular, it seems that we should be trying to articulate ways in which we can both work on individual projects but work critically in a collaborative sense in developed venues in which a certain form of criticism in which multiple projects could go on without it become the Bourdieu and Geertz divisions; given that careers are still individual and in the human sciences, as opposed to the biosciences, are still based on individual publications, this is a dilemma although I think that will not continue; I am interested in trying to develop venues in which a form of collaborative work can go on; it has the self-formative and pedagogical dimension that I have talked about, but also the sorts of objects and projects that we are interested in, their temporality and complexity, is such that the traditional anthropological methods need to be modified if we are going to continue as a relevant discipline in the twenty-first century; broadly speaking that is what I am attempting to do; of course there is some observation but I don't do any more laboratory studies; now I am the principal investigator in this synthetic biology centre so I have a different relationship there as well.

36:51:18 I think it extremely important to defend learning; in the United States as there are strong anti-intellectual pressures; one of my personal “politics of truth” is to convince some of the scientists that they are much more vulnerable than they think; that if the university is going to reinvent itself as a place of somewhat disinterest in learning, which I think is precious, then we need to defend this in a more articulate fashion; if I have a cause it is some kind of cosmopolitan enlightened curiosity and defensive venues which will make that flourish in the twenty-first century; I feel Berkeley is a great research university but, unlike Chicago was, is not a great teaching university. Berkeley’s image as a political hot bed is long out of date.