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Blog, Features, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Ayça Çubukçu: On “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”

Published in 2004 in the inspirational context of a veritably exploding anarchism around the world, David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (referred to here on as Fragments)is a tiny and mighty, genre-defying text. Graeber calls it a pamphlet, “a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos” (Graeber 2004: 1). The pamphlet is impossible to summarize and discuss fully in twenty minutes, especially since in hindsight, it bears the seeds of many of the major arguments Graeber was to develop later in life. I will therefore limit myself to sketching some basic elements of the kind of social theory that Graeber is proposing in this spirited text. Broadly, Fragments seeks to outline a body of radical theory that would, in Graeber’s words, “actually be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to govern their own affairs” (Ibid: 9). This is characteristic of Graeber: the desire to render social theory—particularly anthropology—usefully interesting to radical movements, and radical movements—particularly anarchism—useful and interesting to social theory.

In Fragments, Graeber explores what he names the “strange affinity” between anarchism and anthropology (Ibid: 12). He observes “there was something about anthropological thought in particular—its keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities—that gave it an affinity to anarchism from the very beginning” (Ibid: 13). Graeber himself was fascinated by this, the range of human possibilities in the past and the present, which could unravel the seeming inevitability of our current social and political institutions, while grounding hope for living collectively with greater freedom in more egalitarian arrangements.

Graeber is able to observe the strange affinity between anthropology and anarchism in Fragments because in his version, anarchism is not about a body of theory bequeathed in the 19th century by “founding figures” such as Bakunin, Kropotkin and Proudhon that one would have to adopt wholesale. Instead, it is more about a particular attitude, even a faith that is shared among anarchists (Ibid: 4). Anarchism can be thought of as a faith, Graeber asserts, which involves “the rejection of certain types of social relations, the confidence that certain others would be much better ones on which to build a livable society, [and] the belief that such a society could actually exist” (Ibid: 4). Likewise, the “founding figures” of anarchism did not think they invented anything new—they simply made a faithful assumption that, in Graeber’s words, “the basic principles of anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid—referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about as long as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination.” (Ibid: 3) Arguably, it is this assumption about human history that Graeber sets out to prove valid in his latest book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he co-authored with the archeologist David Wengrow: Humanity has always practiced anarchistic forms of human behavior and social organization—since the Ice Age.

Black and white photo of a man and woman sitting together at a table, smiling, with a skull on the table between them.
Image 1: David and Ayça in Harringay, London, 2017 © Elif Sarican

In Graeber’s vision, in any case, anthropology as a discipline could strengthen faith in the possibility of another world by offering an archive of alternative ways of organizing social relations, of reconstituting them consciously, or of abandoning them altogether. But to be able to strengthen this faith in the possibility of another world free from “the state, capitalism, racism and male dominance” (Ibid: 10), social theory itself would have to assume another world is possible. In fact, Graeber asserts this as the first assumption that any radical social theory has to make. “To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith,” he finds, “since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world is not possible” (Ibid: 10). In a move that resembles a sophisticated theological argument about the existence of God, he then declares, “it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative” (Ibid: 10). I wonder, however, if anthropologists or others can be drawn into such faithful optimism by argumentation. Perhaps one could be inspired to have faith in the possibility of another world and inspire David Graeber did along with the radical movements he dearly treasured.

Graeber’s second proposition is that any radical, particularly anarchist, social theory would have to self-consciously reject vanguardism (Ibid: 11). To his mind, ethnography as an anthropological method provides a particularly relevant, if a rough and incipient model of how “nonvanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice may work” (Ibid: 12). The goal of such a practice would not be to “arrive at the correct strategic analyses and then lead the masses to follow” (Ibid: 11), but to tease out the implicit logics—symbolic, moral or pragmatic—that already underlie people’s actions, even if they are themselves not completely aware of them (Ibid: 12). “One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that,” Graeber writes in Fragments, “to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts” (Ibid: 12). Not prescriptions, but contributions, possibilities, gifts. That is what Graeber offered in his work—particularly in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Direct Action: An Ethnography (2008) and The Democracy Project (2013)—whether his gifts were accepted or not by everyone he wrote about, thought and acted with, or, for that matter, was read by. After all, gifts too can be rejected, and as Graeber recognized, not much of what he proposed or practiced as an anthropologist had “much to do with what anthropology, even radical anthropology, has actually been like over the last hundred years or so” (Graeber 2004: 13).

Nevertheless, in Fragments, Graeber turns to anthropologists, most notably Marcel Mauss, to reflect on his influence on anarchists, despite the fact that Mauss had nothing good to say about them. “In the end, though,” Graeber writes as if speaking about himself as well, “Marcel Mauss has probably had more influence on anarchists than all the other [anthropologists] combined. This is because he was interested in alternative moralities, which opened the way to thinking that societies without states and markets were the way they were because they actively wished to live that way. Which in our terms means, because they were anarchists. Insofar as fragments of an anarchist anthropology do, already, exist, they largely derive from him” (Ibid: 21). In my interpretation, Graeber’s own interest in developing an anarchist anthropology too was driven by an appreciation of and fascination with “alternative moralities” that underpin people’s self-conscious determination to live otherwise—in the anarchist case, free from capitalism and patriarchy, free from the state, structural violence, inequality, and domination.

“This is what I mean by alternative ethics” Graeber explains in a critical section of Fragments where he theorizes revolutionary counterpower and foreshadows a core argument he co-authors in The Dawn of Everything (2021): “Anarchistic societies are no more unaware of human capacities for greed or vainglory than modern Americans are unaware of human capacities for envy, gluttony, or sloth; they would just find them equally unappealing as the basis for their civilization. In fact, they see these phenomena as moral dangers so dire they end up organizing much of their social life around containing them” (Graeber 2004: 24). This is a remarkable proposition. First, it is determined to cast ethics and morality as the constitutive, self-conscious grounds of social organization. Second, it intimates this to be the case across human history, “modern” or “pre-modern.”

In fact, Graeber argues that “any really politically engaged anthropology will have to start by seriously confronting the question of what, if anything, really divides what we like to call the ‘modern’ world from the rest of human history” (Ibid: 36). In Fragments, as well as in the Dawn of Everything, he passionately rejects familiar historical periodizations and evolutionary stages such that the entirety of human history—along with every society, people, and civilization across time and space—becomes populated by examples of human possibility enacted by decidedly imaginative, intelligent, playful, experimental, thoughtful, creative, and politically self-conscious creatures.

For Graeber, human history does not consist of a series of revolutions (Ibid: 44)—be it the Neolithic Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the French Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution—that introduce clear social, moral, or political breaks in the nature of social reality, or “the human condition” as he prefers to think of it. If this is the case, and if anarchism is above all an ethics of practice (Ibid: 95), as he asserts, such an ethics becomes available for anthropological study and political inspiration across human history. It is important to note however that Graeber passionately disagrees with primitivist anarchists inspired by his anthropologist mentor Marshall Sahlins’ (1972) influential essay “The Original Affluent Society,” anarchists who propose that “there was a time when alienation and inequality did not exist, when everyone was a hunter gathering anarchist, and that therefore real liberation can only come if we abandon ‘civilization’” (Graeber 2004: 55). In Fragments, and the Dawn of Everything, he instead draws a more complex history of endless variety where, for instance, “there were hunter gatherer societies with nobles and slaves,” and “agrarian societies that are fiercely egalitarian” (Ibid: 54). Graeber insists, in other words, that “humans never lived in the garden of Eden” (Ibid: 55). The significance of this finding is manifold. Among other things, it means that history can become “a resource for us in much more interesting ways,” and that “radical theorists no longer have to pore endlessly over the same scant two hundred years of revolutionary history” (Ibid: 54).

Writing of revolution in Fragments, Graeber rejects its commonplace definition which “has always implied something in the nature of a paradigm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social reality after which everything works differently, and previous categories no longer apply” (Ibid: 42). Instead, he urges us “to stop thinking about revolution as a thing—‘the’ revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask ‘what is revolutionary action?’” (Ibid: 45). He stresses that “revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light” (Ibid: 45), without necessarily aiming to topple a government, or for that matter, the head of an anthropology department.

I mention this possibility in the playful spirit of David to bring us back to the here and now, and to the final section of Fragments titled “Anthropology,” in which he “somewhat reluctantly bites the hand that feeds him” (Ibid: 95). Graeber observes how, instead of adopting any kind of radical politics, anthropologists have risked becoming “yet another clog in a global ‘identity machine,’ a planet-wide apparatus of institutions and assumptions,” whereby all debates about the nature of political or economic possibilities are seen to be over, and “the only way one can now make a political claim is by asserting some group identity, with all the assumptions about what identity is” (Ibid: 101), he laments. And bitingly, he declares, “the perspective of the anthropologist and the global marketing executive have become almost indistinguishable” (Ibid: 100).

But what does Graeber propose for anthropology instead? Observing that “anthropologists are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of human experience, of social and political experiments no one else really knows about,” he regrets that this archive of human experience is treated by anthropologists as “our dirty little secret” (Ibid: 94). Of course, it was colonial violence that made such an archive possible in the first place as Graeber recognizes without reluctance: “the discipline we know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and mass murder—much like most modern academic disciplines,” he writes (Ibid: 96). Nevertheless, he makes the daring proposition that “the fruits of ethnography—and the techniques of ethnography—could be enormously helpful” for radical movements around the world if anthropologists could “get past their—however understandable—hesitancy, owing to their own often squalid colonial history, and come to see what they are sitting on not as some guilty secret (which is nonetheless their guilty secret, and no one else’s) but as the common property of humankind” (Ibid: 94).  

Towards a conclusion, I would like to submit that anarchism, and the anthropological knowledge of anarchist ethics, practices, and imaginaries across human history are part of “the common property of humankind,” which now includes Graeber’s own contributions to anarchist theory and practice along with his astounding imagination of their possible pasts and futures. Allow me to end then with a strikingly imaginative passage from Fragments, which we could receive as an invitation to think and act towards an anarchist future:

“[A]narchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. … [T]hey would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told. And that, since anarchists are not actually trying to seize power within any national territory, the process of one system replacing the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace—but will necessarily be gradual, the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority.” (Ibid: 40)

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, writing of Madagascar, Graeber observes how “it often seems that no one really takes on their full authority until they are dead.” To my mind, we now have to deal with David’s “full authority” in an anarchist spirit. The task at hand cannot be petrification through idolization or canonization, but the extension of an invitation to think, play, and experiment with his contributions to anthropology and anarchism alike.

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.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Anarchist Anthropology’.

References

Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. 2008. Direct Action: An Ethnography. California: AK Press.

Graeber, D. 2013. The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. New York City: Spiegel & Grau, a publishing imprint of Penguin Random House.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.

Sahlins, M. 1968. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” In Man the Hunter: The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life, Lee and DeVore (eds), pp. 85-9. Chicago: Aldine.

Cite as: Ayça Çubukçu. 2022. “On Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 18 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/18/ayca-cubukcu-on-fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology/

Blog, Features, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

Keir Martin: Great Resignations and Bad Colleagues: Reflections on an Anarchist Anthropology

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a book that fizzes with a multiplicity of ideas; so many that they seem on occasion to overgrow the boundaries of the text. In the text, we see many themes that were to be developed in more detail in later years, in other books such as Debt: The First 5 000 years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018)and his posthumous magnum opus, co-authored with David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). All of the different overflowing themes share a common underlying thread, however; namely a desire to learn from and explore the multiplicity of alternatives to hierarchy and competition that are already in existence, often underneath our noses, rather than lay down a fixed template for resistance. Rather than trying to re-solve the Leninist question of What is to be done?, David continuously asked us to reflect upon the implications of What is being done?. It is in this regard that David’s anarchism and his anthropology most clearly complement each other. By slowing down and paying attention to the variety of ways in which people step outside and subvert hierarchy in order to live a life more worth living, anthropology might become the liberatory discipline par excellence – if only its practitioners were able to realise the potential power within their practice.

Let me take one example from Fragments. On page 60, David discusses the Italian autonomist theory of “revolutionary exodus,” a theory itself inspired by a previous refusal of large numbers of young Italians to engage in wage-labour. David (Graeber 2004, 60) writes that, “[…] in all this Italy seems to have acted as a kind of laboratory for future social movements, anticipating trends that are now beginning to happen on a global scale.” If this was true when David wrote Fragments back in 2004, how much more is it today, when the so-called Great Resignation poses the greatest threat to the return of business as usual in the aftermath of Covid-19.

Julie Andrews from the Sound of Music standing in front of a mountain, arms outstretched as she twirls happily. Meme text reads "This is me quitting my job."
Image 1: Viral internet meme conveying the happiness of resigning

A quick scan of headlines on National Public Radio in the US tells the story. “Business should be booming – if only there were enough workers for the job”, or “As the Pandemic recedes, millions of workers are saying I quit”. And why are they quitting? “I think the pandemic has changed my mindset in a way, like I really value my time,” says Jonathan Caballero, a 27-year-old software engineer who previously commuted 45 minutes each way to work on a daily basis. NPR reports that now he “believes that work has to accommodate life.” Alyssa Casey, a researcher for the federal government states that, “I think the pandemic just allowed for time. You just have more time to think about what you really want.” And NPR reports of 42-year-old restaurant manager Jeremy Golembiewski and his decision to join the Great Resignation:

“In the months that followed, Golembiewski’s life changed. He was spending time doing fun things like setting up a playroom in his garage for his two young children and cooking dinner for the family. At age 42, he got a glimpse of what life could be like if he didn’t have to put in 50 to 60 hours a week at the restaurant and miss Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas morning with his family. ‘I want to see my 1-year-old and my 5-year-old’s faces light up when they come out and see the tree and all the presents that I spent six hours at night assembling and putting out,’ says Golembiewski, who got his first restaurant job at 16 as a dishwasher at the Big Boy chain in Michigan.”

Golembiewski apparently comes from humble origins, but even high-end executives are not immune from the humanising influence of the lockdown. Will Station, a vice-president at Boeing, is reported as becoming “emotional thinking about how much [of his children’s lives] he’s missed and how much he’s getting to experience now.” “I got to see my kids and see their world in a way that I’ve never experienced before,” he says. “It’s very special.” “Even with all the chaos, this has been a bonus year for me.”

NPR also reports in June that people quitting jobs in normal times would signal a healthy economy. But these are not “normal times”; the pandemic led to the worst recession in US history and still a record 4 million quit their jobs in April. The situation has continued in the months since. “The Great Resignation appears to be getting worse” complain Kylie Logan and Lance Lambert on the Fortune news website – who, for some reason, seem unhappy that thousands of working people such as Station and Golembiewski are discovering the joy of spending irreplaceable time with their growing children. In September, a new record of 4.4 million resignations were recorded.

The Great Resignation is one of those phenomena that shows most clearly the interconnection of aspects of life that are often kept conceptually separate. We see in the examples above not simply an individualistic “take this job and shove it” kind of mood, but also the ways in which the refusal of work seems to open the possibility for reimagining the possibilities of gendered relations of kinship and care, which anthropologists have long argued are intimately and unavoidably entwined with the world of paid employment. There was quite a bit of talk in last week’s seminar on Debt of the way in which David was sceptical of the kind of “great transformation” picture of the emergence of capitalist modernity that is an otherwise conventional framing for political economic anthropologists. And indeed, in Fragments (2004, 46), David is quite explicit about this scepticism, stating that,

 “[…] almost everyone agrees that at somewhere in the sixteenth, or seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, a Great Transformation occurred, that it occurred in Western Europe and its settler colonies, and that because of it, we became ‘modern’. And that once we did, we became a fundamentally different sort of creature than anything that had come before. But what if we kicked this whole apparatus away?”

It’s worth making the point however, that David’s argument was not, as he put it, “that nothing important has happened over the past 500 years, any more than I’m arguing that cultural differences are unimportant.” It was rather that once we drop the assumption that this always has to be the starting framing of analysis, and once we decide to “at least entertain the notion that we aren’t quite so special as we like to think, we can also begin to think about what really has changed and what hasn’t.” Alternatives to what we think we are can potentially to be found in our present daily practice; not necessarily to be sought before the total transformation of the rise of capitalism or after the great transformation of the total revolution that is yet to come. David was concerned with the way in which the fetishisation of something called the “market” or the “economy” as separate from the rest of society prioritised particular relational obligations over others – not least the way in which life accommodates work not the other way round, as critiqued by Caballero. This is in many regards an eminently Polanyian critique of the rhetorical disembedding of the market economy from society and the consequent setting up of that market economy as society’s driving institution. And he was always keen to point out that in our daily practice market rationality relies upon – or is, in Polanyi’s (1944) terms, still embedded within – other moral perspectives and practices. Both David and Polanyi knew that any transformation that has occurred in recent centuries – great or otherwise – could never create an economy with the people left out, and that any attempt to do so was doomed to be nothing but a shallow liberal utopia.

Although the Great Resignation came as a surprise to many, one suspects it would not have come as a surprise to David, nor to Polanyi, who might well have seen it as an example of the famous “double movement” by which society, in this case in the shape of Golembiewski, Station, and millions more like them, protect themselves from a disembedded market morality and prioritise the reproduction of persons over the production of objects and economic value. For David it would have been further proof, if more were needed, that something radically different to what we think we are now has been within us and in front of us all along. We might well find radical differences before the great transformation, after the revolution or at the end of a tributary of the Amazon River, but we don’t necessarily have to. We’re as likely to find them in an Amazon distribution centre – if we know how to look. David was fascinated by the grand historical or reassuringly exotic ethnographic examples that have long been the stock in trade of anthropology– he wouldn’t have spent so long conducting fieldwork on magic in Madagascar or researching the role of wampum in early American colonial contacts if he wasn’t. But he also pointed out that assuming that these were the only potential points from which radical difference could be observed meant that we likely overlook them in other spaces.

David felt that the most common use of anthropology by radicals and anarchists, the vision of the egalitarian hunter-gatherer paradise, was of limited value. “I do not think we’re losing much if we admit that human beings never really lived in the Garden of Eden,” he argues in Fragments, again presaging the more fully worked out and demonstrated argument underpinning The Dawn of Everything. Examples from different times and places are not necessarily to be used as examples or templates of “anarchist societies” to contrast what David calls “imaginary totalities” to our own. Whatever new forms of sociality you and I and Station and Golembiewski and the rest of us will build, it is unlikely to look much like !Kung San or the Baining. Such romantic appropriations are vulnerable to a number of entirely reasonable conservative objections. So, in order to give up hierarchy, we have to give up antibiotics, central heating and clean water too? The alternative that you have to offer Station and Golembiewski is that they establish an imaginary totality called an “anarchist society” that goes endlessly wandering across the Orange County in search of nuts and berries? If this is the only or the main use that radicals and anarchists can make of the anthropological record, then doesn’t it implicitly accept or at the very least strengthen the teleology that The Dawn of Everything sets out to weaken – namely that even if our past might have been a Rousseauian paradise rather than a Hobbesian nightmare – that social complexity and technology by their very definition require ever more complex and technologically developed forms of monitoring, control, discipline, hierarchy and oppression? Instead, if, as David suggests in Fragments, we “knock down the walls’ in our thought that separate complex from simple (or the West from the Rest) than this “can allow us to see this history as a resource in much more interesting ways.”

So, when David introduces the example of the Italian autonomists’ “engaged withdrawal” mentioned earlier, he does it immediately after a discussion of Kasja Eckholm’s analysis of the Kongo monarchy as an empty shell that people simply withdrew from. What relevance might this historical practice have for today, David asks? Taking the walls of separation between Italian modernity and Kongolese non-modernity as our assumed starting point means that we almost inevitably find ourselves finding the essential radical difference that we assume they must express. But knocking down the conceptual walls enables us to see the shared desire for greater freedom and the reproduction of valued human relations that they embody. Throughout Fragments, David uses such examples, but in a manner designed to stress the ways in which they might, to some extent at least, express such a common shared desire. Differences exist – differences of perspective, power, and privilege. For an anarchist like David, this almost went without saying. But they are differences that come in and out of being in shifting contexts, not the expression of ahistorical essentialised cultural difference that could only ever be understood by a small coterie of scholars who would be able to see over the wall that separates West from Rest. They are often the differences that emerge within and from oneself, such as the shift in perspective when men such as those mentioned above see their children and their own lives in a different light and attempt to withdraw from the obligations that seek to nullify that new perspective. And if we can’t see how radical and important that is, this is simply because so many of us have naturalised and now fail to even notice the bizarre character of capitalist cosmology. It’s a cosmology that insists that we must believe in the existence of a mysterious cosmic invisible hand that will distribute goods in a fair and efficient manner to us – at least if we worship it properly by (among other things) sacrificing our children to it, in the form of giving up so much precious life-enriching time with them in order to appease its demands, as made manifest in “the labour market.” It’s a cosmology as wild and fascinating as anything else we find in the ethnographic record. And David would point out that the rejection of it that we see today is therefore a potentially profound and revolutionary one, but one that is far less likely to be “taken seriously” in some corners of a discipline still wedded to what Arjun Appadurai famously referred to as “sightings of the savage” as its default mode of intellectual or political critique.

I should note in passing that David would not have been too pleased with me for wheeling out Appadurai in defence of his position. It is fair to say that David was not a great fan. Two weeks ago, Chris Gregory mentioned having initially thought that David was something of a “bullshit artist.” I can confirm the truth of this account. The first time I met David was at a conference in Cambridge about 10 years ago – Chris, David and I were billeted together at a college some distance from the other participants and so spent quite a bit of time together. Chris would complain to me after breakfast that it was bad enough having to listen to the man bullshit endlessly at the conference, but having to endure it first thing in the morning before he’d even woken up properly was another thing altogether. And then when Chris was out of the room, David started talking to me about how thrilled he was to be spending time with the author of Gifts and Commodities (1982), one of his favourite books,and how misguided and intellectually dishonest he felt that Appadurai’s critique of it in The Social Life of Things (1986)had been. It was a slightly awkward situation to manage, although I wasn’t surprised to hear that Chris had come round a few years later. David was on occasion a difficult man to converse with – especially over breakfast – but I knew that the quality and ambition of David’s work would prove irresistible to Chris in the long run.

In following years, David would occasionally ask us rhetorically, “Why do they always refer to me as ‘the anarchist anthropologist,’ why not refer to Appadurai as ‘the neoliberal anthropologist’?” It’s just as accurate but doesn’t get constantly attached to his name as a pejorative in the same way. Of course, David knew that he was being slightly disingenuous here – Appadurai hadn’t authored a book entitled Fragments of a Neoliberal Anthropology, so whether or not David was correct to label him as such, it’s not surprising that such a label was less easily attached to him than it was to David. But the underlying point that David was making – that his own scholarship was endlessly and subtly sneered at and undermined by repeatedly introducing him as such, even when it wasn’t necessarily relevant – was valid and important to make. And it was typical of David that rather than shy away from the association with anarchist theory – that he knew would be used to belittle him and his work – he instead chose to take the prejudice on head first, early in his career, before he had the security of tenure.

Image 2: Book cover of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

Fragments is a book that I found a little frustrating on first read. I found the way in which it jumped from point to point and back again a little – well – fragmentary. Much as I am sure that David was aware that there was a certain contradiction in the author of a book entitled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, complaining that people referred to him as “the anarchist anthropologist,” I was aware that I was kind of missing the point in my frustration at the fragmentary nature of a book with the same title. I felt myself to be in a similar position to the kind of American tourist one occasionally overhears in Copenhagen, loudly complaining that the statue of the Little Mermaid is kind of small. On second reading, however, it went a lot better. As with a conversation with David in real life, one simply had to allow oneself to go with the flow – and if one did, it was a conversational experience like no other. Like Chris, I felt David to be a little much on first meeting – particularly before I’d managed to get to the coffee machine. But in later years, as I got to know him better, I looked forward to those wonderful rambling conversations that went from Ray Davies, through Lukacs on to Rodney Dangerfield and then back home via a detour to discuss 18th century Madagascan pirates.

I think David’s intellectual range sometimes irritated those who envied it and wanted to pull him back into the narrow arid scripture scholarship of the intellectual silos that they had settled for and claimed as their little empires of dirt. The kinds of people who write things in peer-review such as “I can’t believe that the author of this paper on value seems totally unaware of Malinowski’s seminal footnote on Trobriand yam exchange from 1937.” I suspect that what upset these kinds of people most about David was that they knew he probably was aware of the precious little nuggets of knowledge that they had devoted their lives to curating; it was just that – as he always did – he had chosen to go his own way and make his own connections. And in many regards, that was David’s greatest gift to the academy. This is a profession in which success is often driven by networks, nepotism and ass-kissing more than the alleged liberal values of free thought and intellectual inquiry. And in such an environment, David stood out by his consistent refusal to do anything but his own thing.

I’m sure it made him a frustrating colleague at times. But as we all know the category of “good colleague’ is a double-edged sword. Sometimes it means the person who turns their marking in on time and I would not be surprised to hear from colleagues that sometimes David’s contempt for what he might view as the “bullshit” parts of his job left others picking up the pieces. But let us also remember that all too often “being a good colleague’ means being the person who turns a blind eye to bad behaviour and abuse on the part of senior or powerful colleagues out of loyalty to the institution. After years in this profession, my skin tends to crawl when I hear senior colleagues praise the virtues of collegiality– my first instinct is to wonder whose body are we burying or whose mouth are we taping up today? I remain immensely grateful to David for consistently prioritising being a good person over being a good colleague – in this regard at least – and I still, on occasion, miss him very much. His free and sometimes disrespectful spirit is precisely what a profession that all too often demands deference to status, rather than engagement and fresh ideas, needs. And with Fragments we have something that keeps some of that spirit alive – irreverent, bursting with ideas, and most of all principled – whether we all agree with all those principles or not. There’s a spirit of freedom in this short book that senior academics often tell us that we need to squeeze out of ourselves as the price of admission. The greatest gift that David gave us with Fragments is the enduring proof that we don’t have to listen to them.

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.

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Anarchist Anthropology’.

References

Appadurai, A. 1986. The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge university press.

Graeber, D. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. 2021. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London, UK: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.

Gregory, C. 1982. Gifts and commodities. London: Academic Press.

Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

Cite as: Martin, Keir. 2022. “Great Resignations and Bad Colleagues: Reflections on an Anarchist Anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 13 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/13/keir-martin-great-resignations-and-bad-colleagues-reflections-on-an-anarchist-anthropology/

Blog, Features, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, In Honour of David Graeber: Exploring the Fissures and Cracks

David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Anarchist Anthropology

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”. 

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.