Reading: David Graeber Is Gone, But He's Still Changing How We See History By: Jessica Stites / 9 December 2021
David Graeber may be best known as a founder of Occupy Wall Street (a reputation he worked hard to disavow, always instead deferring to the collective decision-making process)
... Maybe, if he wanted to disavow it, you could actually stop referring to him as the founder of OWS. And also, he'd be correct in saying he wasn't the founder of it? Especially when he didn't call for shit and didn't start shit? Like, he was there and was a recognisable face, but that doesn't make someone a founder. (It'd be like saying Bruce Willis is the founder of McDonald's because we saw him in a lot of them and he became very noticeable.)
Anyway, despite him being dead, it's still disrespectful to refer to people as things they did not want to be known for (especially if it's not true).
He died unexpectedly, in September 2020, of pancreatitis. He was 59. Just three weeks prior, Graeber had announced to archaeologist David Wengrow that their book, which they’d been cowriting for a decade, was complete.
I think this is something worth recognising in contextualising a whole a lot about The Dawn of Everything. In some regards, a lot of it reads more like Wengrow than Graeber (at least according to my own memory of Graeber's works), even though there are arguments that Graeber was starting to shift more towards liberal than anarchist (which I'd also agree with—a lot of his later views fit this, and it's also worth recognising the people he surrounded himself with who now cling tight to his legacy and what all of that looks like).
It also contextualises a lot of translation-related stuff, though I doubt Graeber would've paid much attention to them. (Just thinking about how one of my friends pointed out that the phrasing around indigenous peoples in German was uh... awful. But it was translated post-mortem, so his ability to even engage with those critiques was impossible. But Wengrow, on the other hand...)
Wengrow: One might assume the idea of social housing — a little bit like the abolition of slavery — is an idea that took an enormous amount of time before anybody could conceive of doing it and arose from moral and ethical concerns in very recent European cultural media. But neither is true. We have examples in the book not just of social housing but of non-agricultural groups adopting and then abolishing slavery.
I think, when I read things like this, it's where I wish more people would start disputing this understanding of 'progress'. To act as if we have all been 'progressing' to this point, as if everything is a straight line, is part of why people view that these ideas take “an enormous amount of time before anybody could conceive of doing it.” This is part of the issue I've long held with presentations of history and our contemporary moment; we are not progressing in a straight line, and we never have. We see multiple ideas pop up time and time again because people think they're useful; we also see many of the actual good ideas get tossed in favour of propaganda about who abuses those good ideas, courtesy of the few who view themselves as most important.
Progress isn't even cyclical. There are patterns, but they're not consistent in timing.
Anyway, I wish this would be a larger focal point of these historians and social scientists trying to make this point while never actually making that point.
I sense some reviewers might have been expecting a more political or politicized tract, something we deliberately stepped away from — and actually David was the one pulling back.
If what Wengrow says is true, then it makes sense why people continually view Graeber as distancing himself from anarchism in a lot of ways. Again, when a person is dead, it's also possible that the other person gets to put a lot of the criticisms on their shoulders. They can't fight back. (I don't think Wengrow has reason to lie, but we can't even see the push-back that Graeber would have if it were exaggerated.)
Note: I don't like this interview. Parts of it are written in a fawning nature, and I find that infuriating. People can like a book they interview someone about (it does make the interview easier), but it doesn't come off as anything but fawning to repeatedly be in awe over sections mentioned. (It feels more natural when some is like “Okay, I really liked this one section and have some questions about it.”)