What am I on about? Rabinow, Collier and Lakoff refer to Mary Douglas’s work on risk and on the politics of risk perception. Our much-missed friend Mary argued quite convincingly I think that since not all risks can possibly be known, the risks (read: dangers) that a society chooses to focus on reveal a ‘cultural bias’ that relates political and social organization to cosmological circumstance. Societies project into nature (or other societies) dangers that are central to reproducing particular sorts of social form internally.

What interests me then is the politics of the subjects that *anthropologists* select for study (the cultural bias revealed in what they select as worthy of study), and particularly, given my comment above, what anthropologists like these three deem worth of the label ‘contemporary.’ My gut feeling is that even if they would want to stand slightly askew the ‘power discourse’ of war/science that comprises contemporary poltics, their critique probably joins forces with the very discourse they might hope to resist.

Oddly, my impulse then is that intellectuals, and anthropologists in particular, have an obligation not to cede thought to the ideological imperatives of neverending war. I do think that *we* have a special obligation to bring to attention what’s happening in places that people in the U.S. might not have much use for, e.g., say, the Asaro valley of Papua New Guinea. It *really* irks me that Rabinow thinks that “anthropos” is being re-defined — but not by peoples all over the world, rather by molecular scientists.