Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Keir Martin & Ayça Çubukçu

Much to his frustration, David was often labelled ‘the anarchist anthropologist’. Aware of the way the term ‘anarchist’ was used to belittle him and his work, as Keir Martin tells us, David took this prejudice on head first. Anarchism is “not an identity”, his Twitter bio reads, it is “something you do”. In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David elaborates—challenging our traditional assumptions about ‘anarchists’ or ‘anarchism’, and urging us to apply anarchism to the way we do anthropology. As Ayça Çubukçu explains, David saw in anthropology and anarchism a natural fit: anthropology, with its “keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities”, and anarchism, with its confidence that a life more worth living could actually exist. Together, Keir and Ayça take seriously David’s invitation “to think and act towards an anarchist future”. 

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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.

Keir Martin is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.  His work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities.  He conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea.  This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots: Custom and Conflict in East New Britain.  He is currently leading a research project on the spread of psychotherapy among the growing middle-classes of Asia.  He has published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The Guardian.

Ayça Çubukçu is Associate Professor in Human Rights and Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics. She is the author of For the Love of Humanity: the World Tribunal on Iraq (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press). Her writing has appeared in the Law Angeles Review of Books, Jadaliyya, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, Thesis 11, Public Seminar and other venues. Ayça is a member of the editorial collectives of the Humanity Journal, Jadaliyya’s Turkey page, and of the LSE International Studies Series at Cambridge University Press.