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David Graeber
Author profile
born
February 12, 1961
in The United States
genre
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Debt: The First 5,000 Years
  4.40 avg rating — 456 ratings
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published
2011
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5 editions
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Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
by David Graeber, Graeber 4.21 avg rating — 287 ratings
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published
2004
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2 editions
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Direct Action: An Ethnography
4.16 avg rating — 80 ratings
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published
2009
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3 editions
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Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire
4.32 avg rating — 72 ratings
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published
2007
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Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams
4.11 avg rating — 47 ratings
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published
2001
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2 editions
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Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination
  3.92 avg rating — 12 ratings
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published
2011
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Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar
4.56 avg rating — 9 ratings
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published
2007
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2 editions
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Debt: The First 5,000 Years
0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings
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published
2012
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Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber, Grover Gardner 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings
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published
2012
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Untitled Occupy Movement Nonfiction
0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings
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expected publication
2012
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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:
... 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
"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
― 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
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
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