David Graeber

According to Graeber’s bureaucratic procedures “are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence.” But what Graeber means by structural violence is a system “that ultimately rests on the threat of force,” whether police officers, drill sergeants, tax auditors, or all the other agents who support a system that spies, cajoles and threatens. This complex of definitions lands Graeber squarely in the anarchist tradition, and though he layers contemporary anthropological theory into his analysis, he serves up a clear and generally jargon-free argument.

David Graeber is a very thought-provoking thinker. But his recent youtube talk is more striking for what is not said than for what is.

This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value.

In this article, anthropologist Natalia Buier discusses David Graeber’s proposition of an anarchist anthropology. She focuses on three key issues: Graeber’s understanding of ethnography and its role within the politics of anthropology, his reading of the anarchist tradition, and his involvement with the Occupy Wall Street movement as a concrete example of the limitations of the political project of an anarchist anthropology. The argument of the article is that Graeber’s representation of the discipline of anthropology, together with his partial reading of the anarchist tradition, run counter to a political and analytic focus that centralizes the notions of class and exploitation.