In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork
that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the
interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about
Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper
clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new
preface Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.