Memorials

He didn't care who paid him he stood with people everywhere. I want to share his words from when he visited Rojava in the very last part of my undergrad thesis at Yale where he once taught. here's to every eye roll I got when I mentioned "anarchist anthropology."

I am 19, and recently moved to New York. I remember stumbling upon first coming across David's ideas through lectures on youtube. I remember first being introduced to the Rojava struggle through David's connection to it as an 18 year old.

I'm a working-class nobody whom David inspired to believe she could become an anthropologist. I was dreaming about writing under his guidance one day. Is there anything I could do for you right now? Anything at all? Besides holding you in my breath, with all the love that I have?

David Graeber, author of one of the most influential books I’ve ever read—Debt: The First 5,000 Years—died earlier this week.

I didn’t know David Graeber. I’m a 24 yr old girl living in Pennsylvania, USA. I work for fair treatment of prisoners.

Kings. It was already apparent in the twentieth century to the anthropologist A.M.Hocart, one of David’s favorites, that as he said, “So far from having done with divine kingship, we seem to be returning to it in a more virulent form.”

Dear Nika,

I hope you are well, and I hope it isn’t too strange for me, a stranger, to be emailing you.

The weather was absolutely beautiful, the children’s playground packed to the brim – they had their carnival, that’s for sure! I was there for an hour and a half and since nobody came, I packed things up and went to my parents. I couldn’t live down nobody even trying to put a pin on the map in the so-called Poland so I did try.

Hello Miss Dubrovsky,

I hope this email finds you safe and healthy. I have been thinking about writing this email for a long time. I couldn’t decide what to say or how to say, not because I didn’t know enough but because I felt too much and didn’t figure out how to do justice to the feeling I am to address.

Hi Nika,

I messaged you back on Twitter and wanted to re-iterate how inspiring your Museum of Care project sounds. As I mentioned in a recent tweet, I just finished reading David’s “Les Pirates des Lumières”, which was yet another amazing book teasing out the complexities of history.

Having had the opportunity to know and talk regularly with my friend and mentor David Graeber for the past ten years or so, it seems to me that I would be ungrateful if I did not pay tribute to this great man who will remain an inexhaustible source of inspiration for me and for so many others.