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David Graeber resisted the label “the Anarchist Anthropologist.” At the time of his death, the tagline on his Twitter account concluded with a command: “I see anarchism as something you do not an identity so don’t call me the anarchist anthropologist.” Perhaps the closest he came to conceding to the label was when he said, “I’m a scholar who subscribes to anarchist principles and occasionally acts on them.” There is a contrast here, between his willingness to identify as an anthropologist and his hedging around anarchism. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of an anarchist is “a person who believes that all government should be abolished,” or a person who advocates anarchy. It defines anarchy, in turn, as the absence of government, non-recognition of authority in any sphere, a state of disorder, chaos, political or social confusion, or as “the absolute freedom of the individual.” Graeber’s anarchism did not conform to any of these dictionary definitions. But he was an anarchist: he often went on the record saying as much, even if he did reject the label “the anarchist anthropologist.” And he was the first anthropologist to so explicitly trace out the “fragments” of a possible but (at that time, in 2004) “non-existent” anarchist anthropology.

In this article: Anarchism and its relation to anthropology. What did David Graeber mean by anarchism? How did it influence his anthropology? Even if he never aspired to be “the” anarchist anthropologist, we conclude, in retrospect his work did eventually come to constitute an example of actually existing anarchist anthropology.