A previously unpublished essay by David Graeber:
In this short essay, David discusses how a very questionable idea, about the nature of human consciousness, shapes the academic world into a machine for producing "great minds" and, in the end, justifies social structures of inequality.
Published in 2004 in the inspirational context of a veritably exploding anarchism around the world, David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (referred to here on as Fragments) is a tiny and mighty, genre-defying text. Graeber calls it a pamphlet, “a series of thoughts, sketches of potential theories, and tiny manifestos”
This short pamphlet enjoyed an unexpected reception among young scholars as it articulated a perspective of social theory based on practical engagement with the political world.
For David, anthropology and anarchism were conceptually linked – both posited a horizontal and open-ended commitment to common projects; like anarchism, anthropology depends on an effort to understand what the other thinks and feels; in other words, the method of anthropology is the spirit of anarchism. In this brief text, David traces the shared intellectual genealogy of both traditions to illuminate the way an anarchist social theory could reveal the endless variety of human societies.
by Andris Suvajevs
This book is translated to: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovene, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish
If you’re a publisher, please contact estate@davidgraeber.org
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