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A Machine to Make a Future represents a remarkably original look at the present and possible future of biotechnology research in the wake of the mapping of the human genome. The central tenet of Celera Diagnostics--the California biotech

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.

This book was born out of a disagreement among friends. Paul Rabinow, attending a seminar given in 1979 by Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle which concerned, among other things, Michel Foucault, objected to the characterization of Foucault as a typical "structuralist." This challenge stirred a discussion that led to the proposal of a joint article. It became evident as the discussion continued through the summer that the "article" would be a short book. It is now a medium-length book and should have been longer. The book was first to be called Michel Foucault: From Structuralism to Hermeneutics. We thought that Foucault had been something like a structuralist in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge but had moved to an interpretive position in his later works on the prisons and on sexuality. A group of literary specialists and philosophers on whom we inflicted our ideas assured us with great conviction and no arguments that Foucault had never been a structuralist and hated interpretation.