Paul Rabinow interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 31st October 2008

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.