Humanity Reinvented:
Paul Rabinow has a birds-eye view of humanity in the crosshairs of technological invention

Note: all images are part of Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics, at the Berkeley Art Museum, August 26 – November 16, 2003

Not every scholar challenges the foundations of his discipline, but for professor of anthropology Paul Rabinow, that's the only response to the changing scope of humanity. The new science of genetics is transforming how we understand ourselves. As genomics breaks down humankind into its most finite elements, Rabinow has taken a front-row seat at the threshold of the 21st century.

The pioneers of anthropology shipped off to obscure corners of the globe to explore humanity in all its myriad forms -- and fieldwork for many still involves studying migrant workers or a little-known ethnic group. Rabinow, on the other hand, needs to look no further than the Bay Area for his subject: those who conduct scientific research into the fundamentals of life.

The Garden of Delights: Lu, Jack and Carrie, by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (photo by Dennis Cowley)

"I'm interested in the people who produce what's taken to be the truth about things," he says. "I'm interested in studying those people who tell us who we are."

Rabinow conducts fieldwork at two different East Bay biotech laboratories, each with vastly different goals. Each project will grow into a book.

In Alameda, scientists at Celera Diagnostics -- an offshoot of the company that beat public efforts to map the human genome -- hope to identify genetic identification markers for major health issues like cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer's disease. And in downtown Berkeley, researchers at Molecular Sciences Institute take a somewhat less glamorous look at the behavior of yeast cells, exploring whether any models of behavior can be predicted in biology.

In talking with the scientists about their work, why they do it, and why they think it's important, Rabinow pitches his tent in the camp of the discoverers. "So on one hand, you have super high-tech American technology, massively funded, which is going to discover markers for all the known major human conditions within months," he says. "On the other hand, you have someone who says we don't know how the cell works."

Judgment: Juror No.6 (Leopard Spirit), by Daniel Lee

Studying such forward-looking research and its implications requires one to confront the apprehensions many Americans seem to have about genetic research.

"There is a great deal of fear and ignorance about science and technology, especially among the left, or what's left of it," Rabinow says. "Part of my project is enlightenment, of not being blindly afraid."

If some of our collective anxiety grows from a lack of understanding of each new discovery, there's also the sense that science itself is new to humanity. "We know almost nothing about ourselves," he says." The word biology was coined in 1802. It's a young science."

While Rabinow doesn't rule out the potential dangers of biotechnology and genomics, he's committed to giving science a fair shake, the chance to prove itself. Furthermore, the idea that humans shouldn't ask the questions that science can now answer is self-defeating.

"Humans have been intervening in nature for as long as there have been humans," he says. "Certainly there's something distinctive and qualitatively different about what's going on now, but I am not spooked about it myself."

Rabinow calls his research ethnographic anthropology, but his approach is hardly aimed at an audience limited to colleagues. As a tenured senior professor, he feels both the ability and the obligation to try new approaches to writing.

"I've been thinking about ways to write about this stuff that will reach a different public than just my 500 specialists in the academy," he says. In his book about Celera Diagnostics, Rabinow is writing with one of his undergraduate students.

The book will not be a typical ethnographic tome, but will hopefully reach outside the academic world. It may also bridge some divides within it.

Genesis, by Eduardo Kac

"One of the big problems is how to establish a conversation between the biosciences and the human sciences," he says. "The way it's established now, the biosciences discover the truth, and the human scientists worry about the consequences. That seems like a rather poor and not very interesting arrangement."

Ultimately, Rabinow's research both works within the traditional realm of anthropology and aims to reinvent it. If anthropology is the study of humanity, and science is changing the way we look at people, then the discipline itself must take notice.

"The question of what the field should be doing -- if it has any unity, if it has any coherence -- is certainly on the table," he says. "And if we're not able to study the contemporary world, then probably the discipline has no future."

Even so, for a man whose research has spanned everything from Islamic societies in Morocco to philosopher Michael Foucault, Rabinow will find a way to continue to work, even if anthropology itself never recovers from its identity crisis.

"I'm not that obsessed with the discipline," he says. "But I think the contemporary world is tremendously interesting." --Todd Dayton