10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4876
application/pdf
2239-625X
4876
1
es
urn:nbn:it:unica-27465
Dimitris Dalakoglou
Anuac
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
10
In memoriam
2021-07-06
2021-07-06
2021-07-23
2021-07-23
17-22
1
Dimitris Dalakoglou
2021/07/06
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4876
17
2239-625X
1
22
urn:nbn:it:unica-27465
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/4876/4872
10
                                          2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 17-22




David Graeber (1961-2020)*
An anarchist and anthropological farewell to a “sudden thinker”
Dimitris DALAKOGLOU
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam



   When a friend messaged me a few days ago to ask me if I had heard about
David’s death, before the news had been published, my initial reaction was
to search for my cell phone to call him and laugh about the fake news.
   Two or three years ago David and I were having a picnic in a London park.
When I teased him about his fame, with his usual black New York humour he
responded that until fake news of your death circulates, you are not famous
enough. He laughed his distinctive laugh, tilted his head slightly, stared into
the distance with his vivid eyes half-closed and then looked at me as he was
continuing talking. I knew he was about to tell me something he was excited
about and he duly shared an idea for a book that would address a theme on
such a scale that it would have frightened the vast majority of anthropologists,
but not David and his brilliant mind.
   This is how I’d always known David. I still remember, in 2009, discussing
the revolt of December 2008 in Athens. He started telling me about the book
on debt that he was finishing and what an obscure idea debt is, but instead of
presenting the book’s premise, he was interweaving the Greek case, the
ancient Greek history of debt and the history of money throughout the
Mediterranean in ways that only David’s mind could, drawing spontaneous
connections between phenomena that the rest of us would need days of
reading and drafting to bring together. I asked him to write a chapter for the
book that our collective, Occupied London, was preparing about the revolt of

* Thanks to Anna Christofides, Ursula Meany Scott, Theodoros Rakopoulos and Rajko
Mursic for their help with this obituary. [Orginally published in the website Freedom,
September 8, 2020. https://freedomnews.org.uk/2020/09/08/david-graeber-1961-2020-an-
anarchist-and-anthro- pological-farewell-to-a-sudden-thinker/].


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Dimitris Dalakoglou
18                                                           DIMITRIS DALAKOGLOU


December. He generously contributed a chapter entitled, The Greek debt
crisis in almost unimaginably long-term historical perspective. A few months
later, David published what is the most widely read book an anthropologist
and an anarchist has written in the last four decades, if not longer: Debt: the
first 5000 years (2011).
    At the moment of our picnic, Debt was still a best seller in various
languages and featured on many authoritative Top 10 lists. The first years
after its initial publication you would walk in front of big bookstores from
London’s Charing Cross to Athens, Berlin, Amsterdam or NYC and see the
book displayed in the front window. His book on bureaucracy The Utopia of
Rules (2015) had also been recently published around the time of our
meeting and was already becoming popular and influential and was being
translated into several languages.
    The entire discipline of anthropology has David’s work to thank for much
of its current popularity among younger generations who grew up in the
post-2008 crisis world and the state of exception that has become a
permanent form of governance. This generation are fed up with capitalism,
and that American anarchist and anthropologist with the funny voice, who
often dressed in extravagant second-hand clothes bought in the Portobello
flea market, was writing in a way that spoke to them. David’s books were
introducing anthropological and radical political ideas to the general reader
and at the same time innovating our entire discipline, teaching many of us
not to be afraid to mix our politics with our anthropology. We are indebted
to David for his novel approach to thinking and communicating that can be
simultaneously scholarly, engaging and politicised.
    As is well known, David grew up in a working-class family in NYC. His
father fought in the Spanish civil war with the international brigades against
Franco’s fascists, then worked as a lithographer, while his mother was a
garment worker actively involved in her union. David mastered Mayan
hieroglyphic reading as a child and was therefore offered a scholarship from
a private high school. He did his Bachelor in Anthropology at SUNY and his
PhD in Chicago University, carrying out his ethnography in Madagascar –
The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar. As
is the fashion in anthropology, he published this monograph a decade or so
after completing the PhD, thereby offering us what many consider his best
book: Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (2007). This
came a few years after the influential Toward an Anthropological Theory of
Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001) and the celebrated
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004).


2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 17-22
DAVID GRAEBER (1961-2020)                                                       19


   From 1998 to 2007 David was working as assistant and associate professor
at Yale from where he was fired due to his politics both off, but mostly on,
campus. Although Yale never admitted this, there are few who believe
otherwise. Petitions and letters of support were signed by entire
departments of anthropology all over the world, defending David in his
struggle to retain his job.
   In spite of the outcry however, and regardless of the fact that David had
not broken any rules of academia or Yale, he spent two years applying for
jobs in North America and not being shortlisted. Both progressive and
conservative academia manages to ostracise and entrap its members who are
classified as challenging the authority of those who hold managerial power
within the academic workplaces, and this often has wider consequences in
the job market. Yet it was very clear to most of us that if he was not already,
he would soon become one of the most influential thinkers within the
discipline, regardless of being refused academic positions. That was an
experience David never forgot, and I know from first-hand experience that
when he heard of colleagues who were facing trouble in their workplaces due
to their politics on and off campus, he was there to help.
   The department of anthropology in Goldsmiths College offered him a
refuge in 2007. I still have vivid memories of a rainy Sunday when we first
met in London. He had just arrived from the US to start the Goldsmiths job. I
do not remember if he reached out to Occupied London or if we contacted
him. But at that time, the magazine, with Antonis Vradis as its heart, was
one of the best known anarchist publications in the British capital and
beyond, so it made sense for both parties to be in touch. He came with his
companion, smiling and waving from the end of the street as Antonis and I
pointed to them from a distance. At that time I was still having Athenian
anarchist mindset, and as he walked towards us, I remember saying to my
companion that he looked to me like all those nutty American anarchists we
had met the previous decade in the big alter-globalisation marches against
the IMF, the WB and the G8 in Prague, Genova etc. He was a nutty American
anarchist, but he was a very special one.
   In London, David’s presence did rock the boat of a well-established
anthropological scene that was very set and rigid, having its Big Men and Big
Women, as he came full of a new mix of ideas and energy that we desperately
needed. Many European colleagues and comrades were excited to have him
with us. The European Association of Social Anthropologists in 2008 was
held in Ljubljana. One of the organisers, fellow anthropologist and anarchist,
Rajko Mursic, asked me for David’s contact details in order to invite him to
be the plenary speaker. I passed it to him with a warning: “You will really

                                    2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 17-22
20                                                             DIMITRIS DALAKOGLOU


have to remind him and keep him in the loop, he is a creative spirit and his
brain is full of good ideas, but he’s travelling all the time for demos, for work
for personal reasons and he is not always the most organised person in the
world”. David was announced as the keynote plenary speaker, but he had
never made it to Slovenia, for personal reasons, to the explicit
disappointment of more than 1,200 delegates from all over the world, with
some of them coming to the huge lecture hall looking forward to hear him.
   A good friend from the US anarchist scene told me a few years ago: “If you
see Graeber in an American Anthropological Association meeting, give him a
punch from me.” In 2009 his ethnography of direct action groups came out.
It is a rich and very pleasant ethnography, introducing and popularising
ideas about direct action and even teaching such anarchist activist practices.
Yet, some of our finest comrades were not happy with David; he did not
efficiently anonymise them, and in the homeplace of the FBI and NSA, this
can have serious consequences.
   Fearless or reckless, that was David in times. In November of 2010, as the
student movement in the UK was on fire due to the rise in student fees and
many years of the Tories holding power dismantling everything, and as our
throats were rough from screaming “Tory scum!” all morning, a large group
of people ended up in the headquarters of the Conservative Party in
Millibank. Soon the familiar sound of the smashing tempered glass was
heard and the headquarters of the governing party of Great Britain were
being stormed. An ecstatic crowd of 1,500-2,000 pushed forward in the
building, cheering loudly in an atrium with echo that multiplied the sound
ten times over. During that incredible moment I suddenly found David again
in front of the building ‒ I had seen him earlier outside the LSE. The most
typical reaction of an experienced activist in such cases is to cover their face,
but his face was uncovered and he was picking up a thick piece of broken
glass from the smashed windows, putting it into his pocket, smiling. “Why is
your face not covered? And why are you putting evidence of a felony in your
pocket?” “Souvenirs!” he responded, and laughed loudly.
   In 2011 came the Arab Spring, Indignados in Spain, Syntagma square in
Athens, clashes with the police everywhere. People were increasingly
resisting the authorities and their decisions worldwide. David was in Occupy
Wall Street. His involvement with the Occupy Wall Street had cost him a
painful eviction from his apartment in the city where he had grown up. He
was credited as one of the leaders of the movement, a title I believe he was
not very comfortable with, he was simply one of the knowledgeable, high
profile people who happened to be there at the beginning of it all, he had
mentioned once.

2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 17-22
DAVID GRAEBER (1961-2020)                                                       21


   We did disagree often with David during our chats, mostly on politics,
sometimes over anthropological issues, occasionally we also agreed, but it
was always an interesting and rewarding experience talking with him.
Although some people may disagree with me, I think David was modest and
accessible for someone with his fame as you should expect from a person
with an egalitarian ethos. He had many close friends within anthropology
and the activist world, and many people had his phone number and knew
him in a personal capacity. He was getting very excited that people read his
books and by his participation in political projects, most recently his
solidarity with Rojava and the movement for the liberation of Kurdistan, but
otherwise he would not claim authority and would be one of us in those
various contexts.
   In 2013 David moved from Goldsmiths’ to take a well-deserved full
professorship in London School of Economics. He continued his writing and
travelling to various fronts of the global resistance against capitalism and
fascism and he will be remembered by many as a friendly, clever American
intellectual and activist.
   I did not share the information of his death immediately as I was very
numb. I only could write “RIP” and upload a video of him from May 2020
giving a short talk about Covid and bullshit jobs. A newspaper approached
me to write an obituary but I was not ready and I also know his feelings
about newspapers ‒ a feeling many anarchists are sharing: if the papers can
get something out of us they will remember us, if not they will ignore us.
Most recently I remember that, although it had hosted his op-eds many
times, he was livid with the Guardian and its role in undermining Jeremy
Corbyn. Then Freedom kindly approached me to write an obituary forcing me
to absorb the news. Freedom feels right and cosy, an anarchist London-based
magazine run by friends and comrades. Yet I do feel that no obituary can
possibly do justice to David. What to refer to? David as an intellectual? As a
comrade? As an anarchist grassroots activist? As an anthropologist? As a
friend? As a personality? He was larger than life.
   David was gifted in so many ways. Many people will talk about his
magnetic personality and captivating ways of talking, which could also be
scattered at times, but simultaneously full of good ideas that he explained
clearly. He knew his anthropology, his history, his political science, his
political economics, his history of art, and so much more ‒ he would always
surprise you with his depth of knowledge about subjects and phenomena you
would never expect him to be aware of. He could operate at the abstract and
theoretical level as easily as he could pin down, skilled ethnographer that he
was, ideas grounded in the real life experience of regular people.

                                    2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 17-22
22                                                          DIMITRIS DALAKOGLOU


   After I left England for Amsterdam in 2015 we no longer met that often,
but each time would always feel as though we were simply continuing
conversations from our previous meeting, ten months ago or more, as if we
had met only the day before. In order to write this obituary, I went through
the painful task of looking through our written communication. In July 2018,
I received an email from David with the title “sudden thought”. It reads: “Hi
Dimitris, I’m off to Greece for a couple of weeks. Mainly going to be hiding
on islands but just in the very off chance you are around for summer …
David”. That was David full of sudden thoughts that were good thoughts and
many people I know are already missing him and his sudden thoughts that
would occur to him and he would not hold them back, but would instantly
share them.
   David Graeber’s brilliant mind will live through his writings and the
legacy of his political actions for generations to come. He became one of the
most influential thinkers of the Left of our time and he died in a hospital in
Venice on the 2nd of September 2020. He is survived by his wife, the writer
and artist Nika Dubrovsky.




2021 | ANUAC. VOL. 10, N° 1, GIUGNO 2021: 17-22
