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Graeber, David (1961-2020)

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DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2499

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Graeber, David (1961–2020)
CHRIS KNIGHT
University College London, United Kingdom

David Graeber has been described as the Elvis Presley of anthropology—a reference
to the way he successfully subverted his discipline, made it glamorous, and became a
celebrity in the process (Lagalisse 2020). Like Elvis, Graeber was famous in life before
his death propelled him to still greater fame.
Graeber conducted extensive fieldwork 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
slaves. It was not published until 2007, under the title Lost People: Magic and the Legacy
of Slavery in Madagascar. By this time, Graeber had achieved some celebrity as the
author of two successful books. The first, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value:
The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001), was a sophisticated attempt to reconcile the
politics, economics, and anthropology of two pioneering socialists, Marcel Mauss and
Karl Marx. The second, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004), would soon
become a popular political manifesto. In this, Graeber blamed “scientific socialism” for
the horrors of Stalinism, distancing himself from the whole idea of science while prais-
ing anarchist thinkers who “presume no inevitable course of history” (2004, 10–11).
With respect to evolutionary theory, Graeber rejected Darwin’s theory of natural selec-
tion, recommending instead the mutual aid perspective of the Russian anarchist thinker
Peter Kropotkin. A book of collected essays, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebel-
lion, and Desire, was published by AK Press in November 2007, and Direct Action: An
Ethnography appeared from the same press in August 2009.
From January 2013 until June 2016, Graeber was a contributing editor at the Baffler
magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2011 until 2017 he was editor-at-large
of the open-access journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, for which he and
Giovanni da Col cowrote the founding theoretical statement and manifesto. In
December 2017 Graeber and his former teacher Marshall Sahlins released a collection
of essays entitled On Kings, outlining a theory, inspired by A. M. Hocart, of the origins
of human sovereignty in cosmological ritual. Graeber contributed essays on the Shilluk
and Merina kingdoms, and a final essay that explored what he called “the constitutive
war between king and people.”
Graeber grew up in a working-class family in New York. His father, a sailor, fought
in the Spanish Civil War with the international brigades before taking up work as a
lithographer. His mother was a garment worker actively involved in her union; for a
brief period, she was also a celebrated comic performer on the Broadway stage. Hav-
ing developed a deep interest in the decipherment of Maya glyphs as a child, Graeber
was offered a scholarship to a private high school in New York. He did his bachelor
in anthropology at the State University of New York and his PhD at the University of
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan and Simon Coleman.
© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2499
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Chicago under the supervision of Marshall Sahlins. From 1998, Graeber taught at Yale
University, but in 2007 his contract was mysteriously terminated. No reason was given
but Yale’s decision was widely perceived as punishment for his political activism. Peti-
tions and letters of protest were signed by departments of anthropology from around the
world but to no avail. Graeber applied to other US universities but, since none would
offer him an interview, he turned to London. As reader in anthropology he taught at
Goldsmiths, University of London until 2013 and then, aged fifty-two, joined the Lon-
don School of Economics as full professor in anthropology. Graeber died suddenly and
unexpectedly in Venice in September 2020, having just completed The Dawn of Every-
thing, an ambitious book on the origins of social inequality coauthored with the British
archaeologist David Wengrow.
To his activist supporters, Graeber’s immense popularity stemmed from his courage
in breaking taboos. He was willing to talk to outsiders about matters normally kept
secret within the discipline. Prior to the publication of his book on debt, Fragments of
an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) was seized upon by activists and quickly became a
politically explosive tract. Graeber accused his professional colleagues of sitting on a
vast archive of human experience as if it were something shameful, to be kept secret for
fear of its political effects. Anthropology, he argued, is a discipline “terrified of its own
potential” (2004, 97), fearful of divulging to students and the public at large the vast
range of alternatives to capitalism.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) propelled Graeber to global celebrity status. When
it was published in the immediate aftermath of the 2008–9 financial crisis, rumours
circulated that it was being voraciously read not only by socialists and anarchists but
also by senior bankers. The book is an encyclopedic survey of world economic history,
from gift giving to promises to repay, from shell money to hedge funds. Graeber’s core
idea is that people’s dependence on money rests on the existence of territorial zones
governed ultimately by state violence. When the state can no longer inspire fear, we
may expect its monetary hallucinations to dissolve at the same time.
In 2013 Graeber published an essay in the magazine Strike, “On the Phenomenon of
Bullshit Jobs,” highlighting the pointlessness of jobs in such fields as finance, law, human
resources, public relations, and consultancy. With over a million hits, the article crashed
its publisher’s website, encouraging Graeber to revise his case into a full-length book,
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). Graeber concluded that the rise of service sector jobs
owes less to economic need than to “managerial feudalism,” in which employers require
underlings in order to feel important and maintain competitive status and power.
Graeber’s mature outlook on politics and anthropology is such an unusual combi-
nation that it can seem difficult to fathom its sources. The clue lies in the title of his
fieldwork publication Lost People. His experience in a rural community in central Mada-
gascar decisively shaped his views on social inequality, history, religion, state coercion,
the power of narrative, and finally grassroots opportunities for resistance.
Graeber’s informants fell into two categories, mainty (black) and andriana (noble).
The first were “lost people” in being descendants of African slaves, uprooted from their
former homes, cut off from their families in being dispersed and sold to new owners.
The “nobles” came originally from south Borneo. Attached tenaciously to their
ancestor-worshiping traditions, they too were “lost” but in a different sense. Reticent
 G R A E B E R, D AV I D ( 1 9 6 1–2 0 2 0 ) 3

about their slave-holding past and still reluctant to perform physical work for cash,
they became increasingly impoverished when descendants of their former slaves began
to skillfully manage the rising economy of moneylending, cash transactions, and trade.
Graeber’s ethnography describes a world turning upside down as the descendants
of slaves progressively employ, exploit, and partially expropriate their former masters,
against the background of a colonial-era state apparatus now so moribund as to be
virtually irrelevant. With insight and humor, Graeber describes a dilapidated state of
postcolonial near anarchy, giving each “lost person” the freedom to construct their own
narrative in their own chosen way, with effective storytelling the surest route to confi-
dence building, public support, and some chance of financial success. To Graeber, any
attempt to conduct science in this world of creative storytelling seemed an external
imposition, reinforcing the form-filling addiction of the colonial administrator, inter-
ested only in regularities. To follow the scientific method, Graeber felt, is to close one’s
mind to the surprises and exceptions that make up real life, subordinating people’s cre-
ative agency to alien priorities of one’s own. In sympathy with his supervisor, Marshall
Sahlins, Graeber resolved not to bend his own creative imagination to such deadening
and artificial imperatives.
For Graeber, setting aside science was a matter of according respect and equality
to the people he was living among. He saw no reason why the visiting anthropologist
should set themselves up as a mind operating on a higher level. So decisive was that
fieldwork in shaping his worldview that he went on to apply its lessons elsewhere. His
reluctance to seek out regularities or norms among the Malagasy became matched, in
subsequent publications, by a reluctance to claim regularities in any field. This stance led
Graeber to dismiss historical materialism, in particular the idea of history as a sequence
of stages. In his view, allegedly simple hunter-gatherers are no more likely to share
their land or resources than so-called complex storage hunter-gatherers, farmers, or city
dwellers. Irrespective of the prevailing mode of subsistence, people will always have a
wide choice of political options.
Much of Graeber’s later work, coauthored with Wengrow, sought to study prehistory
in broadly the same way. In place of evolutionist assumptions about complexity emerg-
ing incrementally from simple beginnings, the authors argued that the earliest societies
for which we have direct evidence of political arrangements—such as those of Upper
Palaeolithic Europe—were already highly complex. In a controversial article, “Farewell
to the ‘Childhood of Man’: Ritual, Seasonality, and the Origins of Inequality” (Wen-
grow and Graeber 2015), the authors offered a triumphantly non-Darwinian, explicitly
anti-evolutionist account of human political development.
Dismissing any idea that the state once had a beginning, they drew on Marcel
Mauss’s classic study, Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo (1979), to argue that Europe’s
pioneering ice age hunters—known for their sophisticated art and extravagantly
costly burials—alternated seasonally between egalitarian and hierarchical extremes.
Wengrow and Graeber extended their model of a power pendulum to explain subse-
quent concepts of state sovereignty and divine kingship, potencies typically subject
to seasonal, tidal, and other cosmic periodicities. They hint that it must have seemed
pleasurable for people to erect complex political hierarchies at one ceremonial peak,
only to enjoy tearing them down before erecting and destroying them again and again.
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With such periodicity in mind, Graeber opposed what he termed the myth of primitive
communism—the idea that humans in some static way originally held all things in
common. He argued that, since the days of the French Revolution, this myth has done
enormous damage to humanity. Instead of locating communism in a mythical past or
utopian future, Graeber argued that the principle “from each according to their ability,
to each according to their need” is part of everyday life, coming and going without ever
becoming permanent. “All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of
us acts like a communist consistently” (Graeber 2011, 95). Communist society—in the
sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist.
In his work On Kings Graeber treated the state much as he had earlier treated commu-
nism. It is a relationship, not an institution. Elaborating his view that hunter-gatherer
egalitarianism is a myth, he argued that most hunter-gatherers actually live in fear
of thunder gods, guardians of wild animals, and other supernatural beings wielding
coercive powers similar to those of divine kings. The fact that these kings remain other-
worldly does not make them any the less real. All known languages, Graeber reminds us,
possess the imperative grammatical form, indicating widespread acceptance that some
people on at least some occasions may tell others what to do. In this light, kingship turns
out to be merely a particular extension of a general and unavoidable principle.
Given these considerations, Graeber argued that it makes no sense for academics to
attempt to pinpoint the historical beginnings of concepts such as sovereignty or the
state. Equally, it makes no sense for anarchists to strive to abolish the state. At all times
and in all places, from this pluralist anthropological perspective, despotism and free-
dom, dominance and resistance, competition and mutual aid, seem likely to remain
available to humanity as options.

SEE ALSO: Activism; Capitalism; Communism; Sovereignty

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Graeber, David. 2001.Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own
Dreams. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Graeber, David. 2007a. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Graeber, David. 2007b. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Chico, CA: AK
Press.
Graeber, David. 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville.
Graeber, David. 2013. “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” Strike 3. Accessed August 23, 2021,
https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs.
Graeber, David. 2018. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. London: Penguin.
Graeber, David, and Marshall Sahlins. 2017. On Kings. Chicago: Hau Books.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
London: Allen Lane.
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Lagalisse, Erica. 2020. “The Elvis of Anthropology: Eulogy for David Graeber.” Sociological
Review, October 7. Accessed August 10, 2021, https://blog.pmpress.org/2020/10/17/the-
elvis-of-anthropology-eulogy-for-david-graeber.
Mauss, Marcel, with Henri Beuchat. 1979. Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social
Morphology. Translated by James Fox. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Wengrow, David, and David Graeber. 2015. “Farewell to the ‘Childhood of Man’: Ritual, Sea-
sonality, and the Origins of Inequality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21 (3):
597–619.

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