Reading: David Graeber’s Lasting Influence on Anthropology and Activism by: Josh Reno and Holly High / 19 February 2025
By the time of his death in 2020, Graeber had become an important public intellectual. Outside of anthropology, he became known for his popular salvos on work and democracy—including the breakthrough publication Debt: The First 5,000 Years—and his activism within the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. His posthumously published The Dawn of Everything, an ambitious reconsideration of human history co-written with archaeologist David Wengrow, became an international bestseller. More trade books of Graeber’s writing were released posthumously in 2023 and 2024.
All of this feels like a problem, and it also feels like something I should've addressed in the piece I published recently.
The perpetual “posthumously published” is necessary to think about, particularly as one of the books released was The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World..., which was a collection of essays that could be found for free online and came off as a cash-grab for its editors (especially one of them who has been very invested in ensuring his legacy remains as one thing... by having an organisation where Noam Chomsky is on the advisory board—love it when an Epstein friend and defender is in my ~radical~ organisation).
Dealing with grief is one thing, making an organisation that sounds like it's entirely designed to dwell on him and his work alone is... weird.
Our 2023 co-edited book As If Already Free: Anthropology and Activism After David Graeber came out of these conversations.
Again, something else that I feel is weird. The conversations, the workshops... they seem interesting and even helpful as a concept. Creating a book with assumption of “after Graeber,” as if he was the pure originator of any ideas, is strange. Weird, weird, weird.
I hope, first, that the book will inspire others to turn to David’s scholarship to continue probing and prodding the injustices of today’s world.
This comment prompted me to look if any of the people in this article were on the advisory board for DGI, did a small search, and then saw that they post shit from fucking Unherd just because it's Yanis Varoufakis. For fuck's sake.
Anyway, none of them are, but it's just... Why does everything have to circle around Graeber?
But we also spoke about one important way he served the wider discipline: his ability to bring new students to anthropology. I’ve been teaching the introductory anthropology course at the University of Sydney this past semester and have been struck by how many students signed up as a direct result of having read something by Graeber. My hope is that this book can extend that legacy.
I'm going to point out the irony that Australia is one of the countries that have upped the fees on social sciences, making them more expensive. It's worth asking... who is becoming anthropologists here?
While I'm glad people can find inspiration in his work, I find the explicit circling for years... strange.