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.