Rabinow, Paul

Berkeley. 1977. University Of California Press. Reprinted Paperback Edition. Very Good in Wrappers. 0520035291. Foreword by Robert N. Bellah & With An Afterword by Pierre Bourdieu. 170 pages. paperback. keywords: Anthropology Morocco. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Rarely have anthropologists regarded fieldwork as a serious object of study, although it is tacitly accepted as their major activity. How valid is the process? To what extent are the cultural data an artifact of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Rabinow takes the view that fieldwork is an independent cultural activity, valuable in its own right and worthy of narrative report. Having previously published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, here he describes in straight-forward language a series of encounters with his informants, from a French innkeeper holding on to the vestiges of a colonial past to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. The unfolding of these encounters over the length of the author's stay in Morocco develops the book's main theme, that the collection of cultural data shapes and informs that material and its participant observer as well. The book centers on the mutual (yet always partial) construction of fragile commonplaces of activity and communication by the anthropologist and the people he works with in the field. Whether or not readers adopt the author's interpretations, these uncommonly perceptive and provocative reflections of an ethical-philosophical kind, addressing themselves to a major issue in contemporary social science, should interest a broad audience. inventory #13106 ISBN: 0520035291.