Paul Rabinow appointed first Robert H. Lowie Distinguished Chair in Anthropology

Paul Rabinow has been named as the first recipient of the Robert H. Lowie Distinguished Chair in Anthropology. Internationally recognized for his work on modernity, Professor Rabinow is engaged in pathbreaking work on the biosocial, from post-genomics and molecular diagnostics to bio-politics and bio-security.

Professor Rabinow's books have been translated widely, appearing in French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portugese, and Italian editions. The subjects of his ethnographic studies range from descendants of a Moroccan saint coping with the changes wrought by colonial and post-colonial regimes, to participants in contemporary laboratories in molecular biology and genomics. He has defined a new approach that views anthropology as a study reason and, increasingly, affect, asking the question, "Who are the humans at issue and what knowledges constitute them and help them to understand themselves and their environments?"

One of the most publicly visible anthropologists in the United States, Professor Rabinow was named Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the École Normale Supérieure in 2001-2002; delivered the Eighth Daryll Forde Lecture at University College London in 2001 and the David M. Schneider Distinguished Lecture of the Society for Cultural Anthropology in May 2001; was named recipient of the University of Chicago Alumni Association Distinguished Alumni Award in 2000; and in 1998 was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier de l’Ordre des arts et des lettres) by the French Government.

Robert H. Lowie was a leading American anthropologist of the early twentieth century, who received his PhD in 1908 from Columbia University where he studied with Franz Boas. He joined the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley in 1921and taught there for the next thirty years. The Robert H. Lowie Chair was established in his honor with a gift from George M. Foster, who completed his PhD in 1941 at Berkeley studying with Professor Lowie, and was from 1955 to 1979 a faculty member in the Berkeley Anthropology Department

Published April 6, 2009