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…
Tag: In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Chris Gregory: What is the false coin of our own dreams?
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…
Jonathan Parry: The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar
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.…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Value
‘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…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Lost People
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…