David Graeber
David Graeber is an author.
Graeber was an anthropologist who wrote for people outside anthropology, and an anarchist who did the organising as well as the theory. He taught at Yale from 1998, was not rehired when he came up for tenure, which produced a public row and a petition with thousands of signatures, and spent the rest of his career in Britain, first at Goldsmiths and then as a professor at the London School of Economics.
His method was to take something everybody treats as natural and show that it has a history. Debt: The First 5,000 Years argues that credit came before coinage rather than after it, and that the moral language of obligation is older than economics. Bullshit Jobs starts from the observation that a great many people privately believe their own work is pointless, and asks why an efficient market would produce so much of it. The Dawn of Everything, written with David Wengrow, goes after the standard story in which agriculture inevitably produced hierarchy. He had a leading role in Occupy, which is an unusual line on an academic CV and central to how he was read.
He was a genuinely funny writer, prone to the enormous digression, and looser with detail than specialists liked. He died in 2020, aged fifty-nine.
Books (3)
Where to start with David Graeber
Debt is the one to read, and the one that shifted the conversation: five thousand years of credit, coinage, tribute and forgiveness, written with the confidence of somebody convinced the economists have the story backwards. It is long and it wanders, and the wandering is most of the pleasure.
If that is too large a commitment, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a pamphlet-sized argument for what anthropology could offer anarchism and takes an evening. Pirate Enlightenment is the odd late one, a study of pirate settlements in Madagascar and the political ideas that came out of them, narrower and more playful than the big books. Bullshit Jobs and The Dawn of Everything, the two other titles readers arrive looking for, are not among the credits listed here.