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.

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.

Not since Clifford Geertz’s “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” has the publication of an anthropological analysis been as eagerly awaited as this book, Terence S. Turner’s The Fire of the Jaguar.

It’s hard to think of another time when there has been such a gulf between intellectuals and activists; between theorists of revolution and its practitioners. Writers who for years have been publishing essays that sound like position papers for vast social movements that do not in fact exist seem seized with confusion or worse, dismissive contempt, now that real ones are everywhere emerging.

Review of  Magic in the Ancient World,

by Fritz Graf (Harvard University Press, 1998)

Abstract: Anarchism has undergone a broad renewal in the US and Canada in recent decades, flowering most spectacularly in the alter-globalization movement in the years after the protests against the WTO ministerial in Seattle in November 1999. At the time, the movement seemed to outsiders to have spring out of nowhere.

Hundreds of masked, black-clad anarchists adopted Gandhian tactics of nonviolent resistance during the IMF/World Bank protests in Washington, joining with other protesters in forming human chains blockading intersections, singing songs, playing musical instruments and greeting lines of heavily armed riot police with chants of "everything we do, we do because we love you."

The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don’t know how to handle victory.
This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven’t been feeling particularly vic- torious of late.

This is an essay about what it means that humans live in history, in a situa- tion where the future cannot be known and the past cannot be changed and, therefore, where the unpredictable is constantly turning into the irreversible.