Chair: Alpa Shah

Discussants: Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws & Michael Edwards

In a short essay published after his death, David writes that “Good ideas rarely, if ever, emerge from isolation… I have no idea, for instance, the degree to which many of the ideas attributed to me are the product of me, or some of my graduate student friends with whom I spent long hours hashing out the meaning of the universe twenty years ago, and ultimately I think it’s a meaningless question: the ideas emerged from our relation.” This week considers David’s ‘relations’ with two of his anthropological forebears, Terence Turner and Edmund Leach. For David, Turner was “the most underrated social theorist of the last 50 years” and Leach “may have been the man who most inspired me to take up an anthropological career.” Together, they inspired, in big and small ways, much of his thinking around myth and imagination, respectively. David’s contributions to the study of myth and imagination are scattered throughout his work. As Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws (on Turner) and Michael Edwards (on Leach) show, they are key to David’s thinking about possibilities for social transformation.

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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.

Giulio Ongaro is a Wenner-Gren-funded postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at LSE and a member of the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School. He has carried out research on shamanism in highland Laos and is now writing a book on the global history of medicine.

Megan Laws is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology. She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa and has conducted ethnographic research in the Kalahari Desert region. Her work has focused on egalitarianism, sharing, and kinship among Ju|’hoan speakers in Namibia. 

Michael Edwards is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. He’s writing a book about the encounter between Pentecostalism and Buddhism in the context of Myanmar’s so-called transition.