David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bullshit Jobs
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…
Tag: Blog
Mellon Foundation Awards $1.5 Million for Groundbreaking Digital Project Focused on Enslaved Native Americans
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $1.5 million grant to fund Native Bound-Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Americans Enslaved, an…
Academic Authority and Institutional Power in Anthropology
Recent events have raised perennial questions about academic authority and institutional power in anthropology. There are persuasive allegations about more than one famous anthropologist—most recentl…
Guidelines for Collaboration: Museums and Communities Seeking Equitable Change
Dolores Lewis Garcia and Claudia Mitchell during a collections review at the Indian Arts Research Center. Guest post by Emily Santha…
#Hackademics- Hacks for Succeeding in Academia #1: Balancing Family Drama Trauma Fieldwork & Teaching
I recently participated in a webinar with the American Association of Biological Anthropologists and the Sausage of Science Podcast. We discussed mental wellbeing in academia and Dr. Rebecca…
Michael Herzfeld: The Slyness of Stupidity: A Commentary on David Graeber’s “The Utopia of Rules”
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…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bureaucracy
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.…
Michael Edwards: Graeber, Leach, and the Revolution in Myanmar
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…
Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop
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…
Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws: Towards a Progressive Theory of Myth: Turner and Graeber on Social Creativity
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…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Myth and Imagination
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,…
Ayça Çubukçu: On “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”
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…
Keir Martin: Great Resignations and Bad Colleagues: Reflections on an Anarchist Anthropology
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…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Anarchist Anthropology
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…
Zurückgeben ist nicht die einzige Lösung. Wie Objekte in ethnologischen Museen erweckt werden
Die Debatte über die Ausstellung von kolonialer Raubkunst stellt den Sinn ethnologischer Museen in Frage. Dabei gerät eine Sache außer Acht: Solche Begegnungen können vielfäl…
SAR Remembers Ronald N. Dubin
The Dubin Studio under construction in 1997 (left) and after its completion (right). …
Starting CLEAR, maintaining CLEAR
I get a lot of emails asking how I started the lab, how junior scholars might start labs, and how to transform existing labs. This post outlines how…
Chris Knight: Wrong About (Almost) Everything
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…
Maka Suarez: Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH
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…
Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne and James Taylor: State and crisis in Sri Lanka and Thailand: Hearing but not listening in the Theravāda Buddhist world
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…
Keith Hart: Comment on ‘Debt: The Last 5,000 Years’
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…
When my studies became 3D. Learning through objects as a museum intern
After four years of studying social and cultural anthropology at LMU Munich, my internship with Dr. Hilke Thode-Arora, curator of the Oceania department at the Museum Fünf Kontinente…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Debt
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…
Don Kalb: Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’
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…