The book begins with a picture of Rabinow’s life just before his departure for Morocco. He is bored and frustrated with American society, life at University of Chicago, and traditional academia. Although he is nervous about moving to an unknown country for so long, the assassination of Robert Kennedy is the final straw. He is ready to leave the United States and “become an anthropologist” (1).

On the way to Morocco, he has a long layover in Paris. It is 1968, the year of major political protests among French students. Rabinow arrives just as the uprising begins to settle. The crowds in Paris have thinned. He attempts to get involved with the movement, attending meetings in the Sorbonne courtyard, but he had clearly arrived too late. Rabinow describes wandering the empty streets past damaged buildings covered in political graffiti, feeling a sense of dread for the future. He is eager to get to Morocco and begin his fieldwork but is beginning to question what that means and how it fits within a global revolutionary atmosphere.

At the end of his introduction, Rabinow describes the book, explaining that it presents events and encounters as he remembers them, or as he recorded them in his field notes at the time.