David Graeber





David Graeber

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born
in The United States
February 12, 1961

gender
male

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About this author

David Rolfe Graeber is an American anthropologist and anarchist.

On June 15, 2007, Graeber accepted the offer of a lectureship in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he currently holds the title of Reader in Social Anthropology.

He was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him, and his term there ended in June 2007.

Graeber has a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002) and membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World.


Average rating: 4.22 · 2,681 ratings · 451 reviews · 15 distinct works · Similar authors
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
4.28 of 5 stars 4.28 avg rating — 1,658 ratings — published 2011 — 13 editions
Fragments of an Anarchist A...
4.14 of 5 stars 4.14 avg rating — 510 ratings — published 2004 — 5 editions
Direct Action: An Ethnography
4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 avg rating — 161 ratings — published 2009 — 2 editions
Possibilities: Essays on Hi...
4.25 of 5 stars 4.25 avg rating — 110 ratings — published 2007
Toward An Anthropological T...
4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 avg rating — 88 ratings — published 2001 — 4 editions
The Democracy Project: A Hi...
4.43 of 5 stars 4.43 avg rating — 44 ratings — published 2012 — 5 editions
Revolutions in Reverse: Ess...
3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 avg rating — 43 ratings — published 2009 — 3 editions
Lost People: Magic and the ...
4.35 of 5 stars 4.35 avg rating — 17 ratings — published 2007 — 4 editions
Inside Occupy
by
3.0 of 5 stars 3.00 avg rating — 5 ratings — published 2012
Critica della democrazia oc...
by
4.67 of 5 stars 4.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2007
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“Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:
"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

... The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization.”
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.”
David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire

“Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.”
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

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