Chronic Time, Afflicted Lives by Aditya Bharadwaj
“Mine is an illness of time.” […] “Time has no cure.” — Catarina (Joao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, 2005: 107) Chronic is a…
Tag: Features
Andrew Sanchez: Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs
There’s a Committee for Committees! A few weeks ago, I received a message from a colleague. It was the sort of funny thing that one friend says to…
Memorializing Death in an Age of Mass Mortality: Keywords of Covid-19 by Richard C. Keller
How do we remember death when it constitutes our landscape? In an age of ubiquitous mortality—not only pandemic deaths, but also deaths from meteorological disasters, deaths of migrants…
Writing Life No. 17: An Interview with Stacy Leigh Pigg by Stacy Leigh Pigg
Image 1: The desk where Stacy writes when she is actually at a desk. Have you ever taken a walk inside your article? Can you conceive of a…
Massimiliano Mollona: Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism
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…
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…
Introduction: Reducing Harm Responsibly? by Johannes Lenhard
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2021) estimated that, worldwide, 269 million people used drugs in 2018, a 30% increase since 2009. In the same period,…
Incarceration as Harm Reduction: The realities of lethal street-based opioid overdoses in neoliberal Philadelphia by Tali Ziv
Philadelphia is the poorest of the ten largest cities in the United States and has one of the highest rates of fatal opioid-related overdoses in the state of…
Writing Life No. 16: An Interview with Warwick Anderson by James Dunk
Figure 1: Writing and thinking in anticipation of writing: notes stacked in files next to a computer (Warkwick’s desk). In the early days of freedom after a long…
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.…
Viral Waste, or Covid Down the Toilet: Post-Colonic Pandemic Biopolitics by Warwick Anderson
Within days of discovering SARS-CoV-2, laboratory scientists and epidemiologists were speculating on whether the virus might take fecal passage, and thereby spread through contamination with bodily w…
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…
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…
AMAA on Enduring Cancer: Life, Death and Diagnosis in Delhi by Dwaipayan Banerjee
On concepts and consequences: Can we take the concepts of speech and silence, and care and disregard, which you outline throughout the book, outside the context of Delhi…
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…
9/11 and Beyond: Our World of Toxic Exposure/COVID-19 Syndemics by Merrill Singer
For the last 25 years, in my work as an applied medical anthropologist, I have called attention to and explored syndemics, the biosocial adverse interaction of two or…
Infrastructures of inequality: Caring tweets, public health, and COVID-19 in Delhi by Emilija Zabiliūte
One tweet asks for help finding a hospital bed in Delhi, India’s capital. Another asks where to find oxygen. These tweets joined a sea of similar pleas for…
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…
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…
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…
Interdisciplinary Efforts to Oppose a Punitive Perinatal Substance Use Law in North Carolina by Bayla Ostrach
Across the United States, legislators continue to devise new ways to target parents who use drugs through a variety of state systems. In the past twenty years, the…