David Rolfe Graeber (; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist social and political activist. His influential work in social and economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
Born in New York City to a working-class family, Graeber studied at Purchase College and the University of Chicago, where he conducted ethnographic research in Madagascar under Marshall Sahlins and obtained his doctorate in 1996. He was an assistant professor at Yale University from 1998 to 2005, when the university controversially decided not to renew his contract. Unable to secure another position in the United States, Graeber entered "academic exile" in England, where he was a lecturer and reader at Goldsmiths' College from 2007 to 2013 and a professor at the London School of Economics from 2013.
In his early scholarship, Graeber specialized in theories of value (Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2002), social hierarchy and political power (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004, Possibilities, 2007, On Kings, 2017), and the ethnography of Madagascar (Lost People, 2007). In the 2010s he turned to historical anthropology, producing his best-known book, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), an exploration of the historical relationship between debt and social institutions, as well as a series of essays on the origins of social inequality in prehistory. In parallel, he developed critiques of bureaucracy and managerialism in contemporary capitalism, published in The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018). He coined the concept of bullshit jobs in a 2013 essay that explored the proliferation of "paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence".
Although exposed to radical left politics from an early age, Graeber first became directly involved in activism in the global justice movement of the 1990s. He attended protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001 and the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, and later wrote an ethnography of the movement, Direct Action (2009). In 2011, he became well known as one of the leading figures of Occupy Wall Street, credited with coining the slogan "We are the 99%". His later activism included interventions in support of the Rojava revolution in Syria, the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, and Extinction Rebellion.
Early life and education David Graeber was born into a working-class family. His parents were left-wing political activists.
David's father, Kenneth (1914–1996), came from a family of German immigrants who settled in Kansas in the 19th century. He was educated at the University of Kansas, where he met members of the Young Communist League USA. As a result, in 1937 he volunteered for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, where he served as a driver in a medical unit. After the war, he returned to the United States and completed his education. At the same time, he broke with the communists, but remained actively involved in the left-wing movement. During World War II, Kenneth served in the merchant marine. Later, he worked as a plate stripper on offset presses. (English translation)
David's mother, Ruth Rubinstein (1917–2006), was from a family of Polish Jews who moved to the United States in the late 1920s. In the 1930s, she went to college, but due to the Great Depression she was forced to leave and start working in a factory. Ruth was a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. There she took part in the union theater group. The comedy "Pins and Needles" staged with her participation became a hit on Broadway for several years. She did not continue her stage career, returning to the factory.
David's parents met after World War II during their stay at a Communist youth camp. Ruth's parents disowned her for marrying an ethnic German. The family settled in New York, where David and his brother, Eric, were born.
David Graeber grew up in Penn South, a union-sponsored housing cooperative in Chelsea, Manhattan, that Business Week called "suffused with radical politics". At age seven, he had his first experience of political activism when he attended peace marches in New York's Central Park and on Fire Island. He said he became an anarchist at age 16.
Graeber attended local public schools PS 11 and IS 70. His passion for deciphering Maya script helped him win a scholarship that allowed him to spend several years at Phillips Academy Andover. He then attended the State University of New York at Purchase, from which he graduated in 1984 with a BA in Anthropology.
Graeber received his master's degree and doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he won a Fulbright fellowship to conduct 20 months of ethnographic field research in the rural Betafo District in Madagascar, beginning in 1989. His resulting Ph.D. thesis on magic, slavery, and politics was supervised by Marshall Sahlins and titled The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar. His other mentor at Chicago was Terence Turner.
Academic career Graeber taught at Haverford College in Pennsylvania for a year in 1997 and gave a course at New York University.
Yale University (1998–2005) In 1998, two years after completing his PhD, Graeber became an assistant professor at Yale University, then an associate professor. In May 2005, the Yale anthropology department decided not to renew Graeber's contract, preventing consideration for academic tenure, which was scheduled for 2008. Pointing to Graeber's anthropological scholarship, his supporters (including fellow anthropologists, former students, and activists) said the decision was politically motivated. More than 4,500 people signed petitions supporting him, and anthropologists such as Sahlins, Laura Nader, Michael Taussig, and Maurice Bloch called on Yale to reverse its decision. Bloch, a writer on Madagascar who had been a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and the Collège de France, praised Graeber in a letter to the university.
Yale argued that Graeber's dismissal was in keeping with its policy of granting tenure to few junior faculty. Graeber suggested that Yale's decision might have been influenced by his support of a student of his who was targeted for expulsion because of her membership in GESO, Yale's graduate student union.
In December 2005, Graeber agreed to leave Yale after a one-year paid sabbatical. That spring he taught two final classes: "Introduction to Cultural Anthropology" (attended by more than 200 students) and a seminar, "Direct Action and Radical Social Theory".
"Academic exile" and London (2005–2020) On May 25, 2006, Graeber was invited to give the Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics. Each year, the LSE anthropology department asks an anthropologist at a relatively early stage of their career to give the Malinowski Lecture, and invites only those considered to have made significant contributions to anthropological theory. Graeber's address was called "Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance, and stupidity". It was later edited into an essay, "Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor". The same year, Graeber was asked to give the keynote address at the Association of Social Anthropologists 100th-anniversary Diamond Jubilee meetings. In 2011, he gave the anthropology department's annual Distinguished Lecture at Berkeley, and in 2012 he delivered the second annual Marilyn Strathern Lecture at Cambridge (the first was delivered by Strathern).
After his dismissal from Yale, Graeber was unable to secure another position at a US university. He applied for more than 20, but despite a strong track record and letters of recommendation from several prominent anthropologists, never made it past the first round. Meanwhile, several foreign universities offered him a job. In an article on his "academic exile" from the US, The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed several anthropology professors who agreed that Graeber's political activism could have played a role in his unsuccessful search, calling the field "radical in the abstract" (in Laura Nader's words) but intolerant of direct political action. Another factor the article suggested was that Graeber had a reputation as personally difficult or "uncollegial", especially in light of Yale's allegations of poor conduct during the dispute over his dismissal. Graeber himself interpreted his exclusion from American academia as a direct result of his dismissal from Yale, likening it to "black-balling in a social club" and arguing that the charge of "uncollegiality" glossed a variety of other personal qualities, from his political activism to his working-class background, that marked him as a troublemaker. Reflecting on Graeber's case among other examples of "academic silencing" in anthropology, Nader speculated that the real reasons could have included Graeber's growing reputation as a public intellectual and his tendency to "write in English" rather than jargon.
From 2007 to 2013, Graeber was a lecturer and then a reader at Goldsmiths College of the University of London. In 2013, he accepted a professorship at the London School of Economics and Political Science and moved to London.
Graeber became a founding member of the Institute for Experimental Arts in Greece in 2008. He gave a lecture titled "How social and economic structure influences the Art World" at the International MultiMedia Poetry Festival, organized by the Institute for Experimental Arts and supported by the LSE anthropology department.
Main works Graeber is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, the latter of which has been called "a sophisticated attempt to reconcile Marcel Mauss and Karl Marx". He conducted extensive anthropological work in Madagascar, writing his doctoral thesis, The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar, on the continuing social division between the descendants of nobles and the descendants of former slaves. A book based on his dissertation, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar, was published by Indiana University Press in September 2007. A book of collected essays, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, was published by AK Press in November 2007, and Direct Action: An Ethnography appeared from the same press in 2009. In May 2007, AK Press also printed Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations/Collective Theorization, a collection of Graeber's essays co-edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and Erika Biddle.
In December 2017, Graeber and his former teacher Marshall Sahlins released On Kings, a collection of essays outlining a theory, inspired by A. M. Hocart, of the origins of human sovereignty in cosmological ritual. Graeber contributed essays on the Shilluk and Merina kingdoms and a final essay exploring what he called "the constitutive war between king and people". He was working on a historical work on the origins of social inequality with David Wengrow, published posthumously as The Dawn of Everything.