Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to be bombarded with endless—and often strangely moralistic—exhortations to acknowledge the importance of something referred to as “consumption.” The exhortations were effective; for the past 2 decades, the term has become a staple of theoretical discourse.
Articles
Articles and publications
Students are right to march against the markets. Why can’t education be free?
There is a certain type of joy only felt the first time one makes history, and you can’t really describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Yesterday about 10,000 young people from across the country discovered what it’s like.
Super Position
Superhero piece.
David hastens to point out the version in Utopia of Rules is much better though. Because some points were edited out.
THE AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY THAT CAN NEVER BEAND THE ACTIVIST ETHNOGRAPHY THAT MIGH
My first reaction when asked to contribute to this volume is that an auto-ethnography of anthropology would simply be impossible.
My logic was this. During the '80s, we all became used to the idea of reflexive anthropology, the effort to probe behind the apparent authority of ethnographic texts to reveal the complex relations of power and domination that went into making them.
The Bullshit-Job Boom
Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow. Justification reports: What are these? Nobody knows. And yet they pile up around you, Xerox-warmed, to be not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s guess, really, including their authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish this nonsense.
The Bully’s Pulpit: On the elementary structure of domination
In February and early March 1991, during the first Gulf War, U.S. forces bombed, shelled, and otherwise set fire to thousands of young Iraqi men who were trying to flee Kuwait.
The Center Blows Itself Up
Politics, in wealthy countries, is increasingly becoming a war between the generations. While the support for smaller parties in the UK (Liberal Democrats, Greens, the Scottish National Party, even Brexit) is constant across ages, the split between Labour and Conservative is almost entirely based on age cohort:
The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987
What follows is the epilogue to "The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987", which is a historical ethnography about a village called Betafo in central Madagascar, by me, David Graeber.
The elites hate Momentum and the Corbynites — and I’ll tell you why
As the rolling catastrophe of what’s already being called the “chicken coup” against the Labour leadership winds down, pretty much all the commentary has focused on the personal qualities, real or imagined, of the principal players.
