David Graeber

David Graeber was born into a working-class family. His parents were left-wing political activists. David's mother, Ruth Rubinstein (1917–2006), was from a family of Polish Jews who moved to the United States in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, she went to college, but due to the Great Depression she was forced to leave and start working in a factory. Ruth was a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. There she took part in the union theater group. The comedy "Pins and Needles" staged with her participation became a hit on Broadway for several years. She did not continue her stage career, returning to the factory. David's parents met after World War II during their stay at a left camp. Ruth's parents disowned her for marrying an ethnic German. The family settled in New York, where David and his brother, Eric, were born. David Graeber grew up in Penn South, a union-sponsored housing cooperative in Chelsea, Manhattan, that Business Week called "suffused with radical politics". He said he became an anarchist at age 16. Graeber received his master's degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he won a Fulbright fellowship to conduct 20 months of ethnographic field research in the rural Betafo District in Madagascar, beginning in 1989. His other mentor at Chicago was Terence Turner. == Academic career ==

Graeber taught at Haverford College in Pennsylvania for a year in 1997 and gave a course at New York University. "Academic exile" and London (2005–2020) On May 25, 2006, Graeber was invited to give the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics. Each year, the LSE anthropology department asks an anthropologist at a relatively early stage of their career to give the Malinowski Lecture, and invites only those considered to have made significant contributions to anthropological theory. Graeber's address was called "Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance, and stupidity". After his dismissal from Yale, Graeber was unable to secure another position at a US university. He applied for more than 20, but despite a strong track record and letters of recommendation from several prominent anthropologists, never made it past the first round. Meanwhile, several foreign universities offered him a job. In 2013, he accepted a professorship at the London School of Economics and Political Science == Main works ==

Graeber is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, the latter of which has been called "a sophisticated attempt to reconcile Marcel Mauss and Karl Marx". He conducted extensive anthropological work 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 former slaves. A book based on his dissertation, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, was published by 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 2009. In May 2007, AK Press also printed Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization, a collection of Graeber's essays co-edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and Erika Biddle. In December 2017, Graeber and his former teacher Marshall Sahlins released On Kings, a collection of essays 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 exploring what he called "the constitutive war between king and people". He was working on a historical work on the origins of social inequality with David Wengrow, published posthumously as The Dawn of Everything. From January 2013 to June 2016, Graeber was a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he participated in the public debate about futures of technology. From 2011 to 2017 he was editor-at-large of the open access journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, for which he and Giovanni da Col co-wrote the founding theoretical statement and manifesto of the school of "ethnographic theory". In the political magazine Democracy, Charles Kenny wrote that Graeber sought out data that "fit the narrative on the evils of neoliberalism" and challenged or criticized data that suggested otherwise. Debt: The First 5000 Years Graeber's first major historical monograph was Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011). In the Canadian Anthropology Society's journal Anthropologica, Karl Schmid called Debt an "unusual book" that "may be the most read public anthropology book of the 21st century" and wrote, "it will be difficult for Graeber or anyone else to top this book for the attention it received due to excellent timing". Schmid compared Debt to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed for its "vast scope and implication". The economic historian J. Bradford DeLong criticized Debt on his blog, saying it contained mistakes. Graeber responded that the errors did not affect his argument, writing that the "biggest actual mistake DeLong managed to detect in the 544 pages of Debt, despite years of flailing away, was (iirc) that I got the number of Presidential appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong". He dismissed DeLong's other criticisms as a divergence of interpretation, truncation of his arguments by DeLong, and errors in copy editing. As he wrote in an article in STRIKE!: "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." Because of the article's popularity, Graeber then wrote the book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster. In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller wrote that the book had "the virtue of being both clever and charismatic". In The New York Times, Alana Semuels wrote that though the book could be criticized for generalizations about economics, "Graeber's anthropological eye and skepticism about capitalism are useful in questioning some parts of the economy that the West has come to accept as normal." The Guardian gave Bullshit Jobs a mixed review, accusing Graeber of having a "slightly condescending attitude" and calling the book's arguments "laboured" but agreeing that aspects of the book's thesis are "clearly right." Bullshit Jobs spent four weeks in the top 20 of the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. == Activism ==

, New York City in 2007 In addition to his academic work, Graeber was directly and indirectly involved in political activism from the turn of the 20th century. After covering the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in 1999 for the American magazine In These Times, he joined the meetings of the Direct Action Network in New York City. about the relationship between "bullshit jobs" and environmental harm, suggesting that the environmental movement should recognize these jobs in combination with unnecessary construction or infrastructure projects and planned obsolescence as significant issues. Occupy movement In November 2011, Rolling Stone credited Graeber with giving the Occupy Wall Street movement its theme "We are the 99 percent". In The Democracy Project, Graeber called the slogan "a collective creation". Rolling Stone said he helped create the first New York City General Assembly, with only 60 participants, on August 2. In 2014, Graeber tweeted that he had been evicted from his family's home of over 50 years due to his involvement with Occupy Wall Street. He added that others associated with Occupy had received similar "administrative harassment". Democratic confederalism in Syria Graeber became a strong advocate of the democratic confederalism of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria at the time of the Siege of Kobanî in 2014, drawing parallels between its resistance to the Islamic State and the Spanish Revolution his father had fought for. He and Janet Biehl visited AANES's easternmost Jazira Canton as part of an international delegation in December 2014 and allegedly smuggled drones for the People's Defense Units (YPG) in the process. Graeber befriended the Kurdish filmmaker Mehmet Aksoy and wrote a preface to the first volume of Abdullah Öcalan's 2015 book Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization. Graeber harshly criticized the "bizarre, narcissist self-importance" of anarchist groups that refused to take the Kurdistan Workers' Party shift to democratic confederalism seriously, and he emphasized the organizational scale involved in PKK's transformation as compared to the founding of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation by former National Liberation Forces cadres in Mexico. During the 2018 Turkish invasion of the YPG-held Afrin Region in Syria, he accused world governments of "cooperating" with Turkey's state "terrorism". British politics In November 2019, Graeber and other public figures signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, calling him "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world". In December 2019, along with 42 other leading cultural figures, he signed a letter endorsing the Labour Party under Corbyn's leadership in the 2019 UK general election. The letter said, "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few." Graeber, who was Jewish, also defended Corbyn from accusations of antisemitism, saying, "What actually threatens Jews, the people who actually want to kill us, are Nazis", and that the allegations were a weaponization of antisemitism for political purposes. Graeber advocated for a boycott of The Guardian newspaper by fellow left-wing authors after saying that the paper had published distortions about Corbyn for years. He denounced The Guardians alleged role in undermining Corbyn in the 2019 election, which, according to Graeber, resulted in a landslide victory for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. He said The Guardian published progressive authors only to gain credibility with its readership and that its editorial policy was at odds with socialist politics. He was a vocal critic of Labour centrists who attacked Corbyn, saying they disdained socialist movements because they had sold out: "If those activists were not naive, if this man was not unelectable, the centrists' entire lives had been a lie. They hadn't really accepted reality at all. They really were just sellouts." == Influence and reception ==

In the journal Sociology, Kate Burrell wrote that Graeber's work "promotes anarchist visions of social change, which are not quite believed possible by the Left, yet are lived out within social movements every day" and that his work "offers poetic insight into the daily realities of life as an activist, overtly promotes anarchism, and is a hopeful celebration of just what can be achieved by relatively small groups of committed individuals living their truth visibly." Reviewing On Kings in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Hans Steinmüller called Graeber and his co-author Marshall Sahlins "two of the most important anthropological thinkers of our time" and said their contribution was a "benchmark" for the anthropological theory of kingship. After Graeber's death, Penguin Random House editor Tom Penn wrote: "David was a true radical, a pioneer in everything that he did. David's inspirational work has changed and shaped the way people understand the world... In his books, his constant, questing curiosity, his wry, sharp-eyed provoking of received nostrums shine through. So too, above all, does his unique ability to imagine a better world, borne out of his own deep and abiding humanity. We are deeply honoured to be his publisher, and we will all miss him: his kindness, his warmth, his wisdom, his friendship. His loss is incalculable, but his legacy is immense. His work and his spirit will live on." ==Personal life==

Graeber had a long-term relationship with anthropologist Lauren Leve. After that, he had another long-term relationship with Erica Lagalisse. They were engaged from 2013 to 2017. In 2019, Graeber married the Russian-born The two collaborated on a series of books, workshops, and conversations called Anthropology for Kids and on the Museum of Care, a shared space for communication and social interactions nourishing values of solidarity, care, and reciprocity. According to Graeber's website, "The main goal of the Museum of Care is to produce and maintain social relationships." Graeber and Dubrovsky coined the term "museum of care" in their article "The Museum of Care: imagining the world after the pandemic", originally published in Arts of the Working Class in April 2020. In the article, Graeber and Dubrovsky imagine a post-pandemic future where vast surfaces of office spaces and conservative institutions have become "free city universities, social centers and hotels for those in need of shelter." "We could call them 'Museums of Care'—precisely because they are spaces that do not celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space and means for the creation of social relationships and the imagining of entirely new forms of social relations." They also co-founded Yes Women, an art group supporting divorced women in former East Germany. Graeber was not religious; he declared his faith in a just society and in eternal awareness of the impact of one's actions on others. ==Death==

On September 2, 2020, Graeber died suddenly from internal bleeding caused by necrotic pancreatitis As he died during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, his family organized an "Intergalactic Memorial Carnival" of live-streamed events in October 2020 instead of a funeral. His wife attributed the pancreatitis to COVID-19, pointing to his prior good health, strange symptoms they both had for months beforehand, and the connection Dubrovsky believed scientists have since found between COVID-19 and pancreatitis. == Selected publications ==

• • • • There never was a West, Association of Social Anthropologists, 2006. • • • • • • • • == References ==