Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

David Graeber (1961–2020)

2024; Wiley; Volume: 126; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aman.28020

1548-1433

Yancey Orr,

Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

David Graeber, an economic and political anthropologist who became one of the field's most influential public voices, died in Venice on September 2, 2020, at the age of 59 (Figure 1). His daring theories and wide-ranging ethnography excited the public with academic ideas. A committed activist, he played a central role in the anti-globalization and Occupy movements of the late 1990s and early 2010s. A New Yorker, Graeber grew up in a union-sponsored apartment complex called Penn South in Manhattan. Modeled on England's Rochdale cooperatives and consisting of 15 21-story apartment towers built with financing from the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), this working-class, left-wing housing development opened in 1962, the year after Graeber was born.1 Graeber's father, Kenneth Graeber was a printer and socialist who, as a University of Kansas student, volunteered in the Spanish Civil War, driving an ambulance for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His mother, Ruth Rubinstein Graeber, was a Polish Jewish dressmaker and ILGWU activist who in the late 1930s, sang and acted on Broadway in a musical comedy revue, Pins and Needles. It was produced and performed by ILGWU workers and became an unlikely smash hit, running on Broadway for more than two years (and being staged for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the White House) before touring nationally (Fischer, 2021). In this New York milieu, Graeber was nurtured by a rich hybrid of socialist and anarchist philosophy, union-forward folk music, and high-culture artistic and intellectual participation. He was a child prodigy. In his early teens, Graeber translated Mayan hieroglyphs and was encouraged to the point of presenting his work to a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The curator, impressed by Graeber, helped him to receive a scholarship for high school at the elite prep school Phillips Andover Academy. He was a boarding student at its cloistered New England campus. Throughout his life, Graeber moved between contrasting class settings, and he grappled productively with the unresolvable tension between them (High & Reno, 2023.). After his first year at Sarah Lawrence College, Graeber transferred to the State University of New York at Purchase for his undergraduate studies, majoring in anthropology. During city vacations, he explored the punk and alternative indie music scene which was burgeoning in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He would also escape to his family's summer beach cottage on Fire Island off the coast of Long Island. From 1984 to 1996 Graeber studied for his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. It was a time when faculty luminaries were crafting ambitious theories connecting culture, cosmology, and history (Marshall Sahlins); culture, praxis, and value (Terence Turner); culture, symbolic activity, aesthetics, and value (Nancy Munn); culture, language, and context (Michael Silverstein); culture, history, and power (Barney Cohen); and culture, colonialism, capitalism, Christianity, and consciousness (John and Jean Comaroff). Broad theoretical models were worked out by generalizing from close analyses of specific ethnographic examples. For his research, Graeber went to Madagascar, to a rural outpost, Betafo, of the 19th-century Merina Kingdom, which he had learned about from the writings of the French anthropologist Maurice Bloch. Madagascar's government had recently retreated from this rugged highland region because of budgetary shortages, leaving its people, who were predominantly the descendants of enslaved Blacks, effectively unruled by state authority. While some anarchist thinkers might expect these villagers, in the absence of state authority, to create an egalitarian society they did not. In place of being subjected to state violence, the people destroyed themselves through their choices regarding how they lived, how they self-organized, and who they loved, choices that followed from their understanding of their history of slavery. Slavery continued to haunt the present. It left a scarring psychological and social legacy that people could not cast off solely by willing it went. Graeber proposed a Marxian reading of the region's history that explained people's present unhappiness, but he also suggested that, since people's activities in the present are constrained by their understanding of history, they must reimagine their history if they are to improve their future. Stylistically, he described the dramas of their lives as reminiscent of a Russian novel, where the present narrative unfolds through a piecemeal revelation of history. His dissertation, which ran to 800 pages, was later revised and published as the book Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (2007). After short-term positions teaching at Haverford College and New York University, Graeber spent the first nine years of his career at Yale as an assistant and associate professor (1998−2007). On campus, his courses were known for being especially intellectually engaging. While there, Graeber often spent time in New York, where a movement opposing the neoliberal, pro-globalization policies of the World Bank, IMF, and US government was emerging. His involvement in meetings and protests of the anti-capitalist movements of the 1990s and 2000s influenced his first books on social movements, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (2007) and Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009). In these works, he tried to identify how people construct ideas about changing society and how anti-hierarchical organizations can confront contemporary power structures. In 2005 Yale sought to terminate Graeber's employment, although he still had several years left on his contract. According to an anthropology professor at the university during this period, both the department and higher administration held an unfavorable view of Graeber's involvement in direct action protests both on and off campus. The university also felt that he gave insufficient care to his teaching and administrative duties. Graeber contended that he was too radical for the university and that the friction was, in part, due to his support of students who were organizing a graduate student union. Thousands signed a petition urging Yale to reconsider his termination, and his case received support from the Industrial Workers of the World and other labor organizations (Shea, 2013). A settlement was reached giving him one more year of employment at Yale, which he used to conduct research off campus. The following year, Graeber took a position as a reader at Goldsmiths, University College London. He would remain in the United Kingdom for the rest of his life. In 2012, he was hired through the Research Quality Investment Fund at the London School of Economics (LSE), which brought in globally influential academics. While at the LSE, he advised the United Kingdom's Labour Party, formed anarchist syndicates, and organized protests. He helped found the then open-access HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory in 2011. It was in London that he started a relationship with his longtime colleague and friend, Nika Dubrovsky, an artist, activist, and author. They married in 2019. In 2011, Graeber published Debt: The First 5,000 Years. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007−2009 was the book's backdrop. A near collapse of the global economy lowered standards of living worldwide. Brought on by the hubris of mathematical modelers and a systemic misunderstanding of how value is created, it was unclear how anthropology would contribute to understanding this crisis. In this context, Graeber wrote that debt was more than an imbalance in a ledger but a window into the moral confusion over how people intrinsically owe their existence to others. He synthesized Neolithic Mesopotamian transactional records with chicken sacrifices in Indonesia to show how the concept of debt has changed over human history, from the origin myths of hunter-gatherers to world religions and then to capitalism. People were not always expected to keep their promises, and debts were nothing more than one type of promise. However, people were more likely to be expected to repay financial debts than other types of promises. Capitalism and statism made this expectation seem like common sense to its subjects, but in fact, this understanding of debt reifies the web of social life within a hierarchy. Graeber found that states, which are accorded a curious power of debt forgiveness, periodically wipe the ledger clean, usually to restore social order in time of crisis. It was his first best-selling book. During the contested years leading up to his departure from Yale, Graeber cared for his dying mother. The excess of bureaucratic paperwork associated with hospice and health records inspired him to turn his attention to writing about the origins of bureaucracy. His pathos became the 2006 Memorial Malinowski Lecture at the LSE, later published as "Dead Zones of the Imagination" (2012). An expanded treatise came with The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015) which approached the subject with both humor and tragedy. His logical and ethnographic examination of bureaucracy left him questioning whether people desire others to control them, even with the most illogical and harmful of rules. "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant" (2013), published in the magazine Strike, was his most famous essay. Circulated over email, listservs, and syndication, it spread over the years and created a new class consciousness for modern workers. With the eye-catching term "bullshit jobs," his essay attempted to explain why greater technological automation did not create the surplus necessary for meaningful work but drudgery. The growth of useless administrative jobs sapped the energy and time that, if left idle, would threaten finance capital. Graeber lifted the lid off a communal secret: we are spiritually malnourished at work. After collecting hundreds of stories people sent to him about their work experiences, he published the book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory in 2018. That year, it spent weeks as a bestseller and was named one of the books of the year by the Financial Times. For a decade, Graeber researched and wrote The Dawn of Everything (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021) in collaboration with University College London archaeologist David Wengrow. Written for the lay reading public, the book presents an alternative history of the world. It replaces the conventional story of civilization, with its idealization of technological progress and the growth of state power, with a bold tale of unceasing human experimentation in social forms from the Paleolithic onward. Breaking with both Hobbes and Rousseau, Graeber and Wengrow wrote that human nature before civilization was neither good nor bad. Rather, humans in prehistory were, like us, capable of consciously recreating themselves. This is evidenced in the archeological record, which shows wide variation in social formations such as hierarchy and egalitarianism. The critique of European societies by Indigenous people also demonstrated the conscious social reflexivity of "traditional" peoples. In fact, Graeber and Wengrow went so far as to argue that the Enlightenment was triggered by the 17th-century Huron philosopher and statesman, Kondiaronk, whose critical analysis of European settlers in North America was brought back to France. Unusual for a mass-marketed publication, Graeber and Wengrow drafted the book as a series of peer-reviewed articles. It reached number two on the New York Times and Amazon lists for best-selling nonfiction. A finalist for the Orwell Prize in Political Writing in 2022, it will be translated into over 30 languages. With these works, Graeber became one of anthropology's most internationally recognized writers. But his first essay to gain US national attention, "Rebel Without a God," was published in the leftist magazine In These Times in 1998. It explores how a superficial and popular teen drama, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997−2003), was an exposition on how to fight evil in a world devoid of supernatural good. A more pessimistic essay on the prejudice toward social creativity came 15 years later. In "Super Position" (2012), Graeber sketched how comic book villains, defined by the creativity of their diabolical plans, reflect society's conservative apprehension about the role of creativity itself. Graeber would go on to write in both traditional and countercultural publications about such varied topics as altruism and the military, flying cars, the history of the necktie, and the prideful meddling of economists. In these essays, his public readers absorbed foundational social theory. A New Yorker, Graeber spoke quickly and lectured even faster. In his classrooms, filled with activists, intellectuals, and occasionally a member of the Yale football team, he might describe how the Malagasy Famadihana burial ritual resembles the Homeric use of sympathetic magic in the Iliad's poetic imagery of boat sails. Like his written work, Graeber's teaching took students through the complexity of social science and culture with accessible concepts that were built into world-encompassing theories. He developed a cult following among students who in long lines on the hallway floor outside his office, waited to speak with him during office hours. I and other students would absorb his spontaneous social theory lectures while listening to him guide classmates' independent study projects. His graduate students remember a generous mentor and were always only a phone call away regardless of what continent or protest he was in. On a walk down the street with Graeber, he would converse about the cross-cultural ontology of traffic, proper shoelace tying techniques, the aesthetic value of green, what British cuisine would have become if it did not industrialize so early, subversive reliefs carved into buildings, and whether smell could be moral. At the dinner table with him, there might be former guerrilla fighters, members of parliament, fishermen, Amazonian tribal leaders, and cartoonists. He paid for haircuts by lecturing to the staff at an anarchist barbershop. His work benefited from the variety of people he knew and the counterculture to which he contributed. His essay, "What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun?" (2014), provides an exposition on the importance of play and insight into his untraditional approach to daily life. Activists and strangers were often surprised by how generous Graeber was with his time and attention. His closest friends sometimes became frustrated by how he could get entangled with questionable characters, but he also seemed to be energized by such unstable dynamics. Sensitive to criticism, there were several fallings-out with friends. His most nurturing and long-standing friendships were with people with whom he shared ideas, and he built lifelong connections through intellectual partnerships this way. Later in life he regretted not having children, but he was adopted into families where he cherished becoming a beloved, eccentric uncle. When he married at the age of 58, he said that found the domestic stability that had escaped him for so long. During its civil war, he traveled to Syria, risking his life in a warzone. He wrote about his time there in The Guardian and other periodicals. In the northern region of Rojava, he was embedded with soldiers affiliated with the Democratic Union Party (PYD) who were effective in halting advances made by the Islamic State. Not only were they successful on the battlefield, but their movement was built on local self-governing egalitarian cooperatives. Graeber believed that an anarchist revolution had occurred and direct democracy would emerge. Such a revolution would bring freedoms previously hindered by the state such as gender equality. That a new society was blossoming despite being surrounded by hostile nations, militias, and religious authorities was a sign of hope that he compared to the Spanish Civil War. After returning to London, he organized support and memorials for the struggle for a free Rojava (Solnit, 2020). Graeber cared for others with more than words alone. In 2011 and 2012, in cities across the world, people set up encampments in public spaces to protest inequality. Beginning in New York, protesters marched on the city's financial district calling for a more equitable distribution of wealth and limits on the role of money in politics. Called the "Occupy Movement," demonstrators eventually erected tents and occupied Zuccotti Park, sparking similar protests in approximately 1000 cities and towns in 80 countries (Simon Rogers, 2011). The New York encampment lasted two months. In metropoles and regional cities, inhabited tents, makeshift libraries, and communal kitchens could be found in public spaces for over a year. During this period, international media covered the protesters and their messages about greater wealth equality and opportunity. It was an occasion when the radical Left was given a relatively sympathetic outlet in major media. Graeber was considered one of the founders of this movement. Its most salient slogan, referring to the larger percentage of the population that often felt ignored by politics, "We are the 99 percent" was attributed to him, although he insisted its invention was a group effort (Graeber, 2011). Graeber's New York activist network and intellectual framework of direct action, value, and labor, refined over decades, undoubtedly contributed to the Occupy Movement's initial success (Hammond, 2015). Committed to the anarchist principles of egalitarian self-organization, he left New York early in the protests (Buckley & Moynihan, 2011). Graeber often avoided hierarchical leadership roles (Bennett, 2011). In this case, he expressed to me that he wanted the movement to progress through egalitarian cooperation. What he did in helping to found the Occupy Movement was something new for anthropology (Figure 2). For Graeber, anthropology in the 20th century created knowledge. He had an abundance of it which he shared. His life also showed us what could be done with it. Marshall Sahlins took up the task of writing this obituary but his own passing in 2021 prevented him from undertaking it. I would like to thank Lewis Borck, Ayça Çubukçu, Nika Dubrovsky, David Flood, Ilana Gershon, Alex Golub, Mark Leone, Lauren Leve, Victoria Mellor, Christina Moon, Jonathan Padwe, Stuart Rockefeller, Justin Shaffner, Alpa Shah, Paul Silverstein, Emily Vogt, David Wengrow, and Marko Zivkovic for graciously contributing their time, thoughts, and care to this piece. The author expresses special gratitude for Ira Bashkow's insights, energy, and guidance during this process.