For David Graeber

David Graeber was a fiery mind and a fascinating man. He was one of the few intellectuals of our time to link activist practice with high-level analysis throughout his career. I had the pleasure of doing my PhD under his supervision the years he spent at Goldsmiths (2008-2013), before he headed for the LSE (2013-2020). As is well known, Graeber actually took refuge in Goldsmiths, arguably Britain’s most radical anthropology department at the time, after being ostracized for non-scholarly-related reasons by Yale (where he worked between 1998 and 2005 but was not made permanent due to his political activities, as is also by now a matter of public record). Instead of another obituary, I will share here a vignette that speaks volumes with regard to the quality of the man.

I remember going with David to the protests over the sweeping and catastrophic changes in higher education in the UK (especially regarding top-up fees). The demonstrations (November-December 2010) were at the heart of London, Pall Mall and Whitehall, and police used kettling in response to students: squeezing both sides of the demonstration, forcing thousands of protesters to stay. We were blocked, without drinking water or toilet facilities, sometimes under the rain, for many consecutive hours. In the third and final demonstration, certain people fainted from exhaustion, while, little by little, the police (confident of their victory) stepped aside, leaving a minimal passage through which only one protester could pass every 5 minutes or so. David, another friend my age, and I were near the passage. When it was our turn to go, after at least 6 hours of standing, we insisted that David left first. He was a busier man than we were, plus he was 20 years older than us. David vehemently refused and urged us to leave, telling us that he felt bad about leaving the demonstration, and that he would stay until the end. He disappeared into the crowd so that we would not persist anymore. The end to the kettling came 3-4 hours later, when an exhausted crowd was released, after several police beat-ups and dozens of arrests.

The next day I joined David for a drink. He spoke to me passionately about the essay he had just written (“The divine kingship of the Shilluk”), a treatise commenting on classic social anthropology texts on the political organization of a Nilotic tribe well-known to anthros through the classic essay of E.E Evans-Pritchard. In the text, David critically revisited the readings of Shilluk history, discussed already before WWII by James Frazer (in The Golden Bough), the Seligmans, and others. Note that David was an expert of Madagascar (see his monograph Lost People, perhaps his best book) and not of Central Africa – and yet he knew everything about Africanist anthropology (as he knew all his anthropology, really). The study was published the same year, and republished in 2018 in On Kings (one of 12 books written by David in less than 20 years), a volume of political anthropology he co-edited with his former mentor, Marshall Sahlins. He wrote it alongside Debt as a side project; it is 62 pages long and it is magnificent. When I asked him where he found the mind and the power to talk about them while the day before the massacre had preceded, he just laughed and started the political jokes he was used to.

That was David Graeber. A tireless researcher who believed in hard work, but also a solidary political subject who believed in collective action. And finally, a sweet man, who injected both his work and his political activity with great amounts of humour.

We already miss him.

Theodoros Rakopoulos

Social Anthropology, University of Oslo