David Graeber — BrandWiki

David Graeber

Overview

David Graeber

thesis title
birth name	David Rolfe Graeber
birth date	February 12, 1961
death date	September 2, 2020
birth place	New York City, U.S.
death place	Venice, Italy
fields	Economic anthropology Social anthropology
work institutions	Yale University Goldsmiths, University of London London School of Economics
alma mater	State University of New York at Purchase (BA, 1984) University of Chicago (MA, PhD, 1996)

David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist social and political activist. His influential work in social and economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.[1][2]

Born in New York City to a working-class family, Graeber studied at Purchase College and the University of Chicago, where he conducted ethnographic research in Madagascar under Marshall Sahlins and obtained his doctorate in 1996. He was an assistant professor at Yale University from 1998 to 2005, when the university controversially decided not to renew his contract. Unable to secure another position in the United States, Graeber entered "academic exile" in England, where he was a lecturer and reader at Goldsmiths' College from 2007 to 2013 and a professor at the London School of Economics

thesis url	https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Disastrous_Ordeal_of_1987.html?id=BpulSwAACAAJ

doctoral advisor	Marshall Sahlins

known for	Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) The Utopia of Rules (2015) Bullshit Jobs (2018) The Dawn of Everything (2021)

awards	Bread and Roses Award (2012) Bateson Book Prize (2012)

website	www.davidgraeber.org

signature	David Graeber signature.svg

signature alt	David Graeber

spouse	Nika Dubrovsky (m. 2019)

Early life and education

David Graeber was born into a working-class family. His parents were left-wing political activists.[4]

David's father, Kenneth (1914–1996), came from a family of German immigrants who settled in Kansas in the 19th century. He was educated at the University of Kansas, where he met members of the Young Communist League USA. As a result, in 1937 he volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, where he served as a driver in a medical unit. After the war, he returned to the United States and completed his education. At the same time, he broke with the communists, but remained actively involved in the left-wing movement. During World War II, Kenneth served in the merchant marine. Later, he worked as a plate stripper on offset presses.[4][5][6]

David's mother, Ruth Rubinstein (1917–2006), was from a family of Polish Jews who moved to the United States in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, she went to college, but due to the Great Depression she was forced to leave and start working in a factory. Ruth was a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. There she took part in the union theater group. The comedy "Pins and Needles" staged with her participation became a hit on Broadway for several years. She did not continue her stage career, returning to the factory.[4][7][8]

David's parents met after World War II during their stay at a left camp. Ruth's parents disowned her for marrying an ethnic German. The family settled in New York, where David and his brother, Eric, were born.[4][9]

David Graeber grew up in Penn South, a union-sponsored housing cooperative in Chelsea, Manhattan,[10] that Business Week called "suffused with radical politics". At age seven, he had his first experience of political activism when he attended peace marches in New York's Central Park and on Fire Island.[11] He said he became an anarchist at age 16.

Graeber attended local public schools PS 11 and IS 70. His passion for deciphering Maya script helped him win a scholarship that allowed him to spend several years at Phillips Academy Andover. He then attended the State University of New York at Purchase, from which he graduated in 1984 with a BA in Anthropology.[12]

Graeber received his master's degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he won a Fulbright fellowship to conduct 20 months of ethnographic field research in the rural Betafo District in Madagascar, beginning in 1989.[13][14][15] His resulting Ph.D. thesis on magic, slavery, and politics was supervised by Marshall Sahlins and titled The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar.[16] His other mentor at Chicago was Terence Turner.[17]

Academic career

Graeber taught at Haverford College in Pennsylvania for a year in 1997 and gave a course at New York University.[18][19][20][17]

Yale University (1998–2005)

In 1998, two years after completing his PhD, Graeber became an assistant professor at Yale University, then an associate professor. In May 2005, the Yale anthropology department decided not to renew Graeber's contract, preventing consideration for academic tenure, which was scheduled for 2008. Pointing to Graeber's anthropological scholarship, his supporters (including fellow anthropologists, former students, and activists) said the decision was politically motivated. More than 4,500 people signed petitions supporting him, and anthropologists such as Sahlins, Laura Nader, Michael Taussig, and Maurice Bloch called on Yale to reverse its decision. Bloch, a writer on Madagascar who had been a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and the Collège de France, praised Graeber in a letter to the university.

Yale argued that Graeber's dismissal was in keeping with its policy of granting tenure to few junior faculty. Graeber suggested that Yale's decision might have been influenced by his support of a student of his who was targeted for expulsion because of her membership in GESO, Yale's graduate student union.

In December 2005, Graeber agreed to leave Yale after a one-year paid sabbatical. That spring he taught two final classes: "Introduction to Cultural Anthropology" (attended by more than 200 students) and a seminar, "Direct Action and Radical Social Theory".[21]

"Academic exile" and London (2005–2020)

On May 25, 2006, Graeber was invited to give the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics. Each year, the LSE anthropology department asks an anthropologist at a relatively early stage of their career to give the Malinowski Lecture, and invites only those considered to have made significant contributions to anthropological theory. Graeber's address was called "Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance, and stupidity". It was later edited into an essay, "Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor". The same year, Graeber was asked to give the keynote address at the Association of Social Anthropologists 100th-anniversary Diamond Jubilee meetings. In 2011, he gave the anthropology department's annual Distinguished Lecture at Berkeley, and in 2012 he delivered the second annual Marilyn Strathern Lecture at Cambridge (the first was delivered by Strathern).[22]

After his dismissal from Yale, Graeber was unable to secure another position at a US university.[23] He applied for more than 20, but despite a strong track record and letters of recommendation from several prominent anthropologists, never made it past the first round.[23][24]

Main works

Graeber is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, the latter of which has been called "a sophisticated attempt to reconcile Marcel Mauss and Karl Marx".[29] He conducted extensive anthropological work in Madagascar, writing his doctoral thesis, The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar, on the continuing social division between the descendants of nobles and the descendants of former slaves.[30] A book based on his dissertation, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, was published by Indiana University Press in September 2007.[31] A book of collected essays, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, was published by AK Press in November 2007,[32] and Direct Action: An Ethnography appeared from the same press in 2009.[33] In May 2007, AK Press also printed Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization, a collection of Graeber's essays co-edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and Erika Biddle.[34]

In December 2017, Graeber and his former teacher Marshall Sahlins released On Kings, a collection of essays outlining a theory, inspired by A. M. Hocart, of the origins of human sovereignty in cosmological ritual.[35] Graeber contributed essays on the Shilluk and Merina kingdoms and a final essay exploring what he called "the constitutive war between king and people".[36] He was working on a historical work on the origins of social inequality with David Wengrow,[37] published posthumously as The Dawn of Everything.

From January 2013 to June 2016, Graeber was a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he participated in the public debate about futures of technology.[38] From 2011 to 2017 he was editor-at-large of the open access journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, for which he and Giovanni da Col co-wrote the founding theoretical statement and manifesto of the school of "ethnographic theory".[39]

In the political magazine Democracy, Charles Kenny wrote that Graeber sought out data that "fit the narrative on the evils of neoliberalism" and challenged or criticized data that suggested otherwise.[40]

Debt: The First 5000 Years

Graeber's first major historical monograph was Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011). Invited in 2012 by Germany's leader of the opposition, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to present the book in Berlin, Graeber publicly criticized Germany's demands to Greece over debt repayment and told Steinmeier to "wipe out [Greece's] debt now".[41]

In the Canadian Anthropology Society's journal Anthropologica, Karl Schmid called Debt an "unusual book" that "may be the most read public anthropology book of the 21st century" and wrote, "it will be difficult for Graeber or anyone else to top this book for the attention it received due to excellent timing".[42] Schmid compared Debt to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed for its "vast scope and implication".[42] He expressed minor frustrations with the book's length and with some of Graeber's claims and examples that are not fully developed.[43]

Activism

In addition to his academic work, Graeber was directly and indirectly involved in political activism from the turn of the 20th century. After covering the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in 1999 for the American magazine In These Times, he joined the meetings of the Direct Action Network in New York City.[10][17] He then attended protests at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.[26] He was a member of the labor union Industrial Workers of the World and an activist for Peoples' Global Action and the Planetary Alternatives Network.[20] He protested at the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002, supported the 2010 UK student protests, and played an early role in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He co-founded the Anti-Capitalist Convergence. From 2014 onward, he supported the political project of the Kurdish-led Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and its military struggle against the Islamic State and Turkey.

On October 11, 2019, Graeber spoke at an Extinction Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square[53] about the relationship between "bullshit jobs" and environmental harm, suggesting that the environmental movement should recognize these jobs in combination with unnecessary construction or infrastructure projects and planned obsolescence as significant issues.[54][55]

Occupy movement

In November 2011, Rolling Stone credited Graeber with giving the Occupy Wall Street movement its theme "We are the 99 percent". In The Democracy Project, Graeber called the slogan "a collective creation".[56] Rolling Stone said he helped create the first New York City General Assembly, with only 60 participants, on August 2. He spent the next six weeks involved with the burgeoning movement, facilitating general assemblies, attending working group meetings, and organizing legal and medical training and classes on nonviolent resistance. A few days after the encampment at Zuccotti Park began, he left New York for Austin, Texas, and took part in Occupy Austin.

Graeber argued that the Occupy movement's lack of recognition of the legitimacy of either existing political institutions or the legal structure and its embrace of non-hierarchical consensus decision-making and prefigurative politics made it a fundamentally anarchist project. Comparing it to the Arab Spring, he said that Occupy Wall Street and other contemporary grassroots protests represented "the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire". In Al Jazeera, he wrote that the Occupy movement was from the beginning about "commitment to answer only to a moral order, not a legal one" and so held meetings without the requisite permits.

David Graeber

Early life and education

Academic career

Yale University (1998–2005)

"Academic exile" and London (2005–2020)

Main works

Debt: The First 5000 Years

Activism

Occupy movement

Influence and reception

Personal life

Death

Selected publications

Further reading

External links

References

Bureaucracy, managerialism, and "bullshit jobs"

Democratic confederalism in Syria

British politics