David Graeber

David Graeber
Born	David Rolfe Graeber (1961-02-12) February 12, 1961 (age 63)
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	State University of New York at Purchase (B.A.) University of Chicago (Ph.D.)
Known for	Debt: The First 5000 Years Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Awards	Bread and Roses Award Bateson Book Prize
Scientific career
Fields	Economic anthropology Social anthropology
Institutions	Yale University Goldsmiths, University of London London School of Economics

David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; born 12 February 1961) is an American anthropologist, author, anarchist and activist who is currently Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.^[1]

Specialising in theories of value and social theory, he was an assistant professor and associate professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1998 to 2007, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him.^[2] From Yale, he went on to become a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London from Fall 2007 to Summer 2013.^[3]

Graeber has been involved in social and political activism, including the protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001 and the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002. He is also a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Graeber's parents, who were in their forties when Graeber was born, were self-taught working-class intellectuals.^[4] Graeber's mother, Ruth Rubenstein, had been a garment worker, and played the lead role in the 1930s musical comedy revue Pins & Needles, staged by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.^[4][5] Graeber's father Kenneth, who was affiliated with the Youth Communist League in college, though he quit well before the Hitler-Stalin pact, participated in the Spanish Revolution in Barcelona and fought in the Spanish Civil War.^[6] He later worked as a plate stripper on offset printers.^[4] Graeber grew up in New York, in a cooperative apartment building described by Business Week magazine as "suffused with radical politics."^[4] Graeber has been an anarchist since the age of 16, according to an interview he gave to The Village Voice in 2005.^[7]

Graeber graduated from Phillips Academy Andover in 1978 and received his B.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase in 1984. He gained his Masters degree and Doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he won a Fulbright fellowship and completed his Ph.D. thesis on magic, slavery, and politics in Madagascar.^[2]

In 1998, two years after completing his PhD, Graeber became assistant professor at Yale University, then became associate professor.^[2] In May 2005, the Yale Anthropology department decided not to renew Graeber's contract, preventing consideration for tenure which was scheduled for 2008. Pointing to Graeber's highly regarded anthropological scholarship, his supporters (including fellow anthropologists, former students, and activists) claimed that the decision was politically motivated. More than 4,500 people signed petitions supporting him, and well-known anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Laura Nader, Michael Taussig, and Maurice Bloch called for Yale to rescind its decision.^[2] Bloch, who had been a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and the Collège de France, and world renowned scholar on Madagascar, made the following statement about Graeber in a letter to the university:

"His writings on anthropological theory are outstanding. I consider him the best anthropological theorist of his generation from anywhere in the world."^[8]

The Yale administration argued that Graeber's dismissal was in keeping with Yale's policy of granting tenure to few junior faculty and gave no formal explanation for its actions. Graeber has suggested that the University'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.^{[2][9][10][11]}

In December 2005, Graeber agreed to leave the university after a one-year paid sabbatical. That spring he taught two final classes: an introduction to cultural anthropology (attended by over 200 students) and a course entitled “Direct Action and Radical Social Theory” – the only explicitly radical-themed course he ever taught at Yale.

On 25 May 2006, Graeber was invited to give the Malinowski Lecture at the London School of Economics; his address was entitled "Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity".^[12] This lecture has since been edited into an essay, titled "Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy and interpretive labor".^[13] The anthropology department at the University honors an anthropologist at a relatively early stage of their career to give the Malinowski Lecture each year, and only invites those who are considered to have made a significant contribution to anthropological theory. That same year, Graeber was asked to present the keynote address in the 100th anniversary Diamond Jubilee meetings of the Association of Social Anthropologists.^[14] In April 2011, he presented the anthropology department's annual Distinguished Lecture at Berkeley,^[15] and in May 2012 delivered the Second Annual Marilyn Strathern Lecture at Cambridge.

From 2008 through Spring 2013, Graeber was a lecturer and a reader at Goldsmith's College of the University of London. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, he accepted a professorship at the London School of Economics in 2013.^[16][17]

David Graeber is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. He has done 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. A book based on his dissertation, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, appeared from Indiana University Press in September 2007. A book of collected essays, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire was published by AK Press in November 2007 and Direct Action: An Ethnography appeared from the same press in August 2009, as well as a collection of essays co-edited with Stevphen Shukaitis called Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations//Collective Theorization (AK Press, May 2007). These were followed by a major historical monograph, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House), which appeared in July 2011.^[18] Speaking about Debt with the Brooklyn Rail, Graeber remarked:

The IMF (International Monetary Fund) and what they did to countries in the Global South—which is, of course, exactly the same thing bankers are starting to do at home now—is just a modern version of this old story. That is, creditors and governments saying you’re having a financial crisis, you owe money, obviously you must pay your debts. There’s no question of forgiving debts. Therefore, people are going to have to stop eating so much. The money has to be extracted from the most vulnerable members of society. Lives are destroyed; millions of people die. People would never dream of supporting such a policy until you say, “Well, they have to pay their debts.”^[19]

In December 2011, Graeber was reported to be working on a book for Random House connecting "the story of the Occupy movement to an exploration of the past and future of direct action, participatory democracy, and political transformation", and another for Melville House combining three essays on bureaucracy (one of which he delivered as the Malinowski Lecture in 2006).^[20] He is also working on an historical work on the origins of social inequality with University College London archaeologist David Wengrow.

His book on the Occupy movement and related issues was released as The Democracy Project in 2013. One of the points he raises in this book is the increase in what he calls bullshit jobs, referring to meaningless employment. He sees such jobs as being "concentrated in professional, managerial, clerical sales, and service workers".^[21] As he explained also in an article in STRIKE! magazine:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.^[22]

Since January 2013, Graeber has been a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 2011, he has also been editor at large in the free online journal HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory, for which he and Giovanni da Col co-wrote the founding theoretical statement.

In addition to his academic work, Graeber has a history of both direct and indirect involvement in political activism, including membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World, a role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002, support for the 2010 UK student protests,^[23] and an early role in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He is co-founder of the Anti-Capitalist Convergence.^[24]

In November 2011, Rolling Stone magazine credited Graeber with giving the Occupy Wall Street movement its theme: "We are the 99 percent". Rolling Stone says Graeber helped create the first New York City General Assembly, with only 60 participants, on August 2.^[25] He spent the next six weeks involved with the burgeoning movement, including facilitating general assemblies, attending working group meetings, and organizing legal and medical training and classes on nonviolent resistance. A few days after the encampment of Zuccotti Park began, he left New York for Austin, Texas.^[4]

Graeber has argued that the Occupy Wall Street movement's lack of recognition of the legitimacy of either existing political institutions or the legal structure, its embrace of non-hierarchical consensus decision-making and of prefigurative politics make it a fundamentally anarchist project.^[26] Comparing it to the Arab Spring, Graeber has claimed that Occupy Wall Street and other contemporary grassroots protests represent "the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire."^[27] He is a member of the labor union Industrial Workers of the World and of the Interim Committee for the emerging International Organization for a Participatory Society.^[28]

• Graeber, David (2001). Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave. ISBN 978-0-312-24044-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Graeber, David (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press (distributed by University of Chicago Press). ISBN 978-0-9728196-4-0. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Graeber, David (2007). Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-34910-1. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Graeber, David (2007). Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland, CA: AK Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-66-6. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Graeber, David (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh Oakland: AK Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-79-6. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Graeber, David (2011). Debt: The First 5000 Years. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Melville House. ISBN 978-1-933633-86-2. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Graeber, David (2011). Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination. London New York: Minor Compositions. ISBN 978-1-57027-243-1. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Graeber, David (2013). The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. New York: Spiegel & Grau. ISBN 9780812993561. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Graeber, David (2015). The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House. ISBN 978-1-61219-375-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)

As co-editor

• Graeber, David (2007). Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations / Collective Theorization. Oakland, CA: AK Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-35-2. OCLC 141193537. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)

• — (March 2006). "Transformation of Slavery Turning Modes of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery" (PDF). Critique of Anthropology. 26 (1): 61–85. doi:10.1177/0308275X06061484. Retrieved February 15, 2012.
• — (September 2011). "The Divine Kinghip of the Shilluk: On Violence, Utopia, and the Human Condition, or, Elements for an Archaeology of Sovereignty". HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Retrieved April 16, 2013.
• — (December 2012). "Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy, and Interpretive Labor. The 2006 Malinowski Memorial Lecture". HAU: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Retrieved January 21, 2013.

• — (December 27, 1998). "Rebel Without a God". In These Times. Retrieved February 15, 2012. A meditation on the anti-authoritarian elements of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• — (August 21, 2000). "Give it Away". In These Times. 24, (19). Retrieved February 15, 2012.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) An article about the French intellectual Marcel Mauss
• — (January–February 2002). "The New Anarchists". New Left Review (13). Archived from the original on January 30, 2010. Retrieved February 15, 2012.
• — (June 1, 2003). "The Twilight of Vanguardism". Indymedia DC. Retrieved February 15, 2012. An essay originally delivered as a keynote address during the "History Matters: Social Movements Past, Present, and Future" conference at the New School for Social Research on May 3, 2003
• — (January 6, 2004). "Anarchism in the 21st Century". Z Magazine. Retrieved February 15, 2011. Co-authored with Andrej Grubacic
• — (December 6, 2005). "On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture" (PDF). Retrieved February 15, 2012. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help) Originally an address to Anthropology, Art and Activism Seminar Series at Brown University's Watson Institute, December 6, 2005
• — (January 2007). "Army of Altruists". Harper's. Retrieved February 15, 2012. An attempt to solve the riddle of why so many working class Americans vote right-wing
• — (October 12, 2007). "The Shock of Victory". Infoshop News. Retrieved February 15, 2012.
• — (October 16, 2007). "Revolution in Reverse". Infoshop News. Retrieved February 15, 2012.
• — (April 1, 2008). "The Sadness of Post-Workerism, or, "Art and Immaterial Labour" Conference: a Sort of Review" (PDF). The Commoner. Retrieved February 15, 2012. An assessment of recent trendy autonomist theory (à la Negri, Lazzarato, etc.), with some comments on the relation of art, value, scams, and the fate of the Future.
• — (November 17, 2008). "Hope in Common". Autonomedia.org. Archived from the original on February 10, 2009. Retrieved February 15, 2012. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• — (February 10, 2009). "Debt: The First Five Thousand Years". Mute Magazine. 2 (12). Retrieved February 15, 2012.
• — (November 2010). "Against Kamikaze Capitalism: Oil, Climate Change and the French refinery blockades". Shift. Retrieved February 15, 2012.
• — (December 7, 2010). "To Have Is to Owe". Triple Canopy (10). Retrieved February 15, 2011. An illustrated essay on the history of debt, containing excerpts from Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011)
• — (September 25, 2011). "Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers the Radical Imagination". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved January 18, 2013.
• — (March 2012). "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit". The Baffler. Retrieved January 7, 2013.
• — (April 2013). "A Practical Utopian's Guide to the Coming Collapse". The Baffler. Retrieved February 15, 2014.
• — (August 2013). "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs". Strike! Magazine. Retrieved August 19, 2013.
• — (February 2014). "What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun". The Baffler. Retrieved February 15, 2014.
• — (March 26, 2014). "Caring too much. That's the curse of the working classes". The Guardian. Retrieved April 12, 2014.
• — (May 30, 2014). "Savage capitalism is back – and it will not tame itself". The Guardian. Retrieved May 31, 2014.

• Sutton, David (September 2004). "Anthropology's Value(s): A Review of David Graeber's Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value". Anthropological Theory. 4 (3): 373–379. doi:10.1177/1463499604042818.
• Guyer, Jane I. (December 2009). "On 'possibility': A response to 'How Is Anthropology Going?'". Anthropological Theory. 9 (4): 355–370. doi:10.1177/1463499609358143.

• Academic profile at Goldsmiths, University of London
• Interview to Mark Thwaite (for Ready Steady Book)
• Template:Worldcat id
• David Graeber at IMDb
• David Graeber, profile - The Guardian
• In Conversation: World of Debt: David Graeber with Spencer Woodman, The Brooklyn Rail
• David Graeber Reddit Questionnaire (January 28, 2013)
• David Graeber, Anthropologist, London School of Economics, video, dailymotion.com
• Soak the Rich: An exchange on capital, debt, and the future. (David Graeber and Thomas Piketty)

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