Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Jonathan Parry & Maurice Bloch

Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his first, major scholarly work. We are led in this discussion by Prof. Maurice Bloch and Prof. Jonathan Parry—two of David’s colleagues at the LSE and engaged readers of David’s work. They carry us through the complexity of David’s arguments about history and narrative and raise important questions about whether he engages deeply enough with the socio-economic realities that Malagasy people faced at the time of his research.

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These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, and are published as a FocaalBlog feature in tribute to the life and work of David Graeber.

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Alpa Shah is Professor of Anthropology at LSE, convenes a research theme at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and is author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas.

Jonathan Parry is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He is the author of Classes of Labour: Work and Life in a Central Indian Steel Town and co-editor with Chris Hann of Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism. Parry writes more broadly on the classic anthropological themes of caste, kinship, marriage, and exchange. Alongside Maurice Bloch, he has also co-edited two classic works in anthropology, Death and the Regeneration of Life and Money and the Morality of Exchange.

Maurice Bloch is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the LSE. He has carried out long-term ethnographic research in Madagascar, is the author of In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theories of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social, and writes more broadly on power, history, kinship, ritual, and cognition.