Paul Rabinow (1944–2021) was a professor of anthropology at the University of California Berkeley and director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory. Born in Florida and raised in New York City, he obtained bachelor, master, and doctorate degrees from the University of Chicago. Following Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, he wrote a number of other works, including The Foucault Reader (1984), French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (1989), Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (1993), Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (1996), and Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (2007).

Rabinow began writing Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco during his first fieldwork experience as a University of Chicago graduate student. He acts as the main character of the book as he confronts both the complexities of working in a foreign culture and the ways in which his own self-image is altered by the Otherness he experiences.

The owner of the Hotel de l’Oliveraie in Sefrou, where Rabinow first stays, Maurice Richard, known as Richard, was born to a professional Parisian family and came to Morocco to find a new way of life. Richard is a 15-year resident of Morocco, but he has few friends, and his business is failing.