Graeber, David

GRAEBER, DAVID (1961-2020). A radical anthropologist, organizer and public intellectual, David Graeber wrote on economic and political history and theory, often in collaboration. He travelled constantly on speaking tours and organized through networks that arose from the Global Justice movement and Occupy Wall Street.

Graeber was born into a working-class Jewish family in New York City. His father was an internationalist, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and his mother a labor union activist and a lead actor in Pins and Needles. He received a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1996 and began teaching at Yale University two years later. As a favored student of Marshall Sahlins, Graeber conducted field work in a Malagasy community in Madagascar. He wrote a “dialogic ethnography,” detailing their lives and everyday resistances in the teeth of a colonialist state. His scholarship echoed the radical tradition of Marcel Mauss and Pierre Clastre. In 2007 Yale refused to renew his contract as assistant professor and dismissed him. Grauber and many supporters publicly protested, but the administration held firm. Thereafter, he could not find an academic job in the United States and in 2005 decamped to England, where he resided until the end of his life.

While teaching at Yale University, Graeber was active in the Direct Action Network (DAN), a US component of the Global Justice movement, crucible of twenty-first century activism. He also began work on his magnum opus, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). In Debt, Graeber brought rich examples from archeology and economic anthropology into the mainstream of Western political discourse. In this and all his writing, Graeber was a great upender of political dogmas. He contended, for example, that western theories of social evolution arose to contest indigenous American critiques of the settler state. In the tradition of the Franz Boas school, he contested the myths and “likely stories” that hold up classical economics and life under capitalism. He attacked the nostrums of economic ideology, its foundational myths from the historical below. A key theme in Debt concerned the emergence of money from a long history of organized violence. Debt’s publication coincided with the financial crisis and the global “movement of the squares,” a global surge of activism that the internationalist Graeber found congenial.

In 2011 Graeber was among a small cadre of activists who organized the Occupy Wall Street [OWS] encampment. They worked along anarchist lines, with a daily general assembly. The OWS movement went national, and Graeber spoke on US broadcast TV about the movement that coined the slogan “We are the 99%”.

Graeber wrote easily, in a familiar voice. He aimed to write theory that was “kind to the reader.” Like Colin Ward, Graeber saw “everyday anarchism” as natural human behavior. Much of what he wrote served as a gateway to activism for young people. Debt made Graeber a best-selling author. He traveled and spoke regularly. He wrote continuously and gave many interviews. He was a constant figure in social media. An engaging speaker and discussant, Graeber put himself in the thick of many fields of struggle, framing questions and provocative theses. His book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018) proceeded from the provocative thesis that many people in Europe and North America spent their working lives doing tasks that were, ultimately, of little use or value.

David Graeber died suddenly of “natural causes” in a Venice hospital at age fifty-nine.

Sutton, David. "Anthropology's Value(s): A Review of David Graeber's Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value". Anthropological Theory. 4 (September 2004), pp. 373–79.