David Rolfe Graeber is an American anthropologist,
author, anarchist and activist who is currently
Professor of Anthropology at the London School
of Economics.
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. From
Yale, he went on to become a Reader in Social
Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of
London from Fall 2007 to Summer 2013.
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.
Early life
Graeber's parents, who were in their forties
when Graeber was born, were self-taught working-class
intellectuals. 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. 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. He later worked as a plate stripper on
offset printers. Graeber grew up in New York,
in a cooperative apartment building described
by Business Week magazine as "suffused with
radical politics." Graeber has been an anarchist
since the age of 16, according to an interview
he gave to The Village Voice in 2005.
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.
Academia
In 1998, two years after completing his PhD,
Graeber became assistant professor at Yale
University, then became associate professor.
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
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. 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."
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.
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 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". This lecture
has since been edited into an essay, titled
"Dead zones of the imagination: On violence,
bureaucracy and interpretive labor". 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.
In April 2011, he presented the anthropology
department's annual Distinguished Lecture
at Berkeley, 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.
Authorship
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
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 InvestigationsCollective
Theorization. These were followed by a major
historical monograph, Debt: The First 5000
Years, which appeared in July 2011. Speaking
about Debt with the Brooklyn Rail, Graeber
remarked:
The IMF 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.”
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. 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". 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.
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.
Activism
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,
and an early role in the Occupy Wall Street
movement. He is co-founder of the Anti-Capitalist
Convergence.
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. 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.
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. 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." 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.
Publications
Books
—. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value:
The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York:
Palgrave. ISBN 978-0-312-24044-8. 
—. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.
Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. ISBN 978-0-9728196-4-0. 
—. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of
Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-34910-1. 
—. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion,
and Desire. Oakland, CA: AK Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-66-6. 
—. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Edinburgh
Oakland: AK Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-79-6. 
—. Debt: The First 5000 Years. Brooklyn,
N.Y.: Melville House. ISBN 978-1-933633-86-2. 
—. Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics,
Violence, Art, and Imagination. London New
York: Minor Compositions. ISBN 978-1-57027-243-1. 
—. The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis,
a Movement. New York: Spiegel & Grau. ISBN 9780812993561. 
—. Bureaucracy. Melville House. ISBN 978-1-61219-375-5. 
As co-editor
—. Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations
/ Collective Theorization. Oakland, CA: AK
Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-35-2. OCLC 141193537. 
Articles
Academic
—. "Transformation of Slavery Turning Modes
of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism
is a Transformation of Slavery". Critique
of Anthropology 26: 61–85. doi:10.1177/0308275X06061484.
Retrieved February 15, 2012. 
—. "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. 
—. "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. 
General
—. "Rebel Without a God". In These Times.
Retrieved February 15, 2012.  A meditation
on the anti-authoritarian elements of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer
—. "Give it Away". In These Times 24,. Retrieved
February 15, 2012.  An 
article about the French intellectual Marcel
Mauss
—. "The New Anarchists". New Left Review.
Archived from the original on January 30,
2010. Retrieved February 15, 2012. 
—. "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
—. "Anarchism in the 21st Century". Z Magazine.
Retrieved February 15, 2011.  Co-authored
with Andrej Grubacic
—. "On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets:
Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and
the Cosmological Role of the Police in American
Culture". Retrieved February 15, 2012.  Originally
an address to Anthropology, Art and Activism
Seminar Series at Brown University's Watson
Institute, December 6, 2005
—. "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
—. "The Shock of Victory". Infoshop News.
Retrieved February 15, 2012. 
—. "Revolution in Reverse". Infoshop News.
Retrieved February 15, 2012. 
—. "The Sadness of Post-Workerism, or, "Art
and Immaterial Labour" Conference: a Sort
of Review". The Commoner. Retrieved February
15, 2012.  An assessment of recent trendy
autonomist theory, with some comments on the
relation of art, value, scams, and the fate
of the Future.
—. "Hope in Common". Autonomedia.org. Archived
from the original on February 10, 2009. Retrieved
February 15, 2012. 
—. "Debt: The First Five Thousand Years".
Mute Magazine 2. Retrieved February 15, 2012. 
—. "Against Kamikaze Capitalism: Oil, Climate
Change and the French refinery blockades".
Shift. Retrieved February 15, 2012. 
—. "To Have Is to Owe". Triple Canopy. Retrieved
February 15, 2011.  An illustrated essay
on the history of debt, containing excerpts
from Debt: The First 5000 Years
—. "Occupy Wall Street Rediscovers the Radical
Imagination". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved January
18, 2013. 
—. "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate
of Profit". The Baffler. Retrieved January
7, 2013. 
—. "A Practical Utopian's Guide to the Coming
Collapse". The Baffler. Retrieved February
15, 2014. 
—. "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.".
Strike! Magazine. Retrieved August 19, 2013. 
—. "What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun.".
The Baffler. Retrieved February 15, 2014. 
—. "Caring too much. That's the curse of
the working classes". The Guardian. Retrieved
April 12, 2014. 
—. "Savage capitalism is back – and it
will not tame itself". The Guardian. Retrieved
May 31, 2014. 
References
Further reading
Sutton, David. "Anthropology's Value(s): A
Review of David Graeber's Toward an Anthropological
Theory of Value". Anthropological Theory 4:
373–379. doi:10.1177/1463499604042818. 
Guyer, Jane I.. "On 'possibility': A response
to ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’". Anthropological
Theory 9: 355–370. doi:10.1177/1463499609358143. 
External links
Academic profile at Goldsmiths, University
of London
Interview to Mark Thwaite
Works by or about David Graeber in libraries
David Graeber at the Internet Movie Database
David Graeber, profile - The Guardian
In Conversation: World of Debt: David Graeber
with Spencer Woodman, The Brooklyn Rail
David Graeber Reddit Questionnaire
David Graeber, Anthropologist, London School
of Economics, video, dailymotion.com
