Mindfulness

Paul Rabinow (his homepage, with a picture of him) and his mates at Berkeley have set up a rather fine collaborative enterprise called the Laboratory for the Anthropology of the Contemporary.

Note: Most academics who have pictures of themselves in that pose on their homepages tend to be slightly insecure about their intellect. That's why they show themselves thinking. But I have heard Professor Rabinow give a talk: it was exceptionally nuanced, sophisticated and interesting. To put it in a nutshell, Paul Rabinow is a very, very clever man.

LAC is all very state-of-the-art and super-duper; it has a highly pertinent programme on Biosecurity, for example. See? Cutting edge academicians, and all that. Who said we sat in ivory towers? Anyway: despite my usual raised eyebrows at academic jargonese, which proliferates here, LAC seems a Good Thing, particularly since it's making its working papers and documents available to all.

But of course, this post is all about me, not Professor R. Because I'm taking the liberty of reproducing, here, the fantastic painting on LAC's home page. Isn't it just great? I guess I like it in part because it's a weirdly accurate representation of my subconscious mind, these days.You can see a bigger version here.