One of the lowest moments of my undergraduate studies in Economics back in the 1990s happened whilst reading Tom Peters’ Liberation Management (1992), where the management guru/McKinsey-associate pro…
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Massimiliano Mollona & Andrew Sanchez When David Graeber published his article ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’ in Strike! in 2013, he knew he st…
David Graeber’s wide-ranging – and, appropriately, sometimes wildly swashbuckling – set of essays sketches his anarchist utopia by default, as a social world free of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, he…
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussant: Michael Herzfeld If the previous week in our series focused on the imagination, this week considers what for David Graeber was its antithesis: bureaucracy.…
I would never have expected Ruth to join the revolution. But then so much of what’s happened in Myanmar this past year has been somehow unexpected, from the…
I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part…
David Graeber’s work is often described as ‘myth-busting’. His most recent scholarly work with David Wengrow is explicitly so – a weeding out (excuse the farming pun) of…
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws & Michael Edwards In a short essay published after his death, David writes that “Good ideas rarely, if ever,…
Published in 2004 in the inspirational context of a veritably exploding anarchism around the world, David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (referred to here on as Fragments)is…
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a book that fizzes with a multiplicity of ideas; so many that they seem on occasion to overgrow the boundaries of the…
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Keir Martin & Ayça Çubukçu Much to his frustration, David was often labelled ‘the anarchist anthropologist’. Aware of the way the term ‘anarchist’ was…
A review article on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021. The Dawn of Everything’s central idea…
Let me begin by saying “this is a thought experiment”; a phrase David often used, and I find useful. In this talk I’d like to propose an approach…
Although historically and geographically diverse, but sharing religious cultural roots, contemporary Sri Lanka and Thailand are both characterised by authoritarianism. This parallel cannot be explain…
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years was published in summer 2011. In August-September of that year, he took part in the first New York City General Assembly…
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Keith Hart & Maka Suarez In 2011, David published Debt: The First 5000 Years, a book that would establish him as one of the major…
Image 1: Book Cover. The last two decades in anthropology would have been dramatically less exciting without David Graeber. Given David’s prominent association with the Occupy rebellions and…
I confess that the first time I met David I was not impressed. It was in 2006 at a conference in Halle. David gave a 50-minute summary of…
Image 1: Book cover of Lost People David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar began life as his University of Chicago doctoral thesis.…
‘Value’ is the one central themes that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped…
Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his…
Image 1: Social distancing signs. Photo by ©Acabashi CC-BY-SA 4.0 To understand the massive world-disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic we need a sociology of complicity. Since the different…
Identity and class While identity is of course a fundamental category in European philosophy at least since Aristotle, its politicization is a much more recent phenomenon. One can…
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his…