Category Archives: Blog
Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne and James Taylor: State and crisis in Sri Lanka and Thailand: Hearing but not listening in the Theravāda Buddhist world
Although historically and geographically diverse, but sharing religious cultural roots, contemporary Sri Lanka and Thailand are both characterised by authoritarianism. This parallel cannot be explained as simply due to both countries being Theravāda polities. Nevertheless, dominant politics in both countries express elements of conservative ethno-Buddhism, within the cultural markers of national identity and contested political […]
Keith Hart: Comment on ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years was published in summer 2011. In August-September of that year, he took part in the first New York City General Assembly that formed the Occupy Wall Street movement. Much of the contemporary world revolves around claims we make on each other and on things: ownership, obligations, contracts and […]
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Debt
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Keith Hart & Maka Suarez In 2011, David published Debt: The First 5000 Years, a book that would establish him as one of the major contemporary critics of our current economic paradigm. Around the same time, he contributed to the creation of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that made the book all […]
Don Kalb: Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’
The last two decades in anthropology would have been dramatically less exciting without David Graeber. Given David’s prominent association with the Occupy rebellions and with the Western Left more generally, this is even true for the Western world at large. With the publication of his debt book (Graeber 2010) – also exactly a decade ago […]
Chris Gregory: What is the false coin of our own dreams?
I confess that the first time I met David I was not impressed. It was in 2006 at a conference in Halle. David gave a 50-minute summary of what was to become his Debt book. He covered 5,000 years in 50 minutes, and this was in an era when the Grand Narrative was very much […]
Jonathan Parry: The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s ‘Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar’
David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar began life as his University of Chicago doctoral thesis. It was not for some years that it appeared in print. That was 2007, and by then he had already published a considerable amount of other work, including a couple of significant books. To […]
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Value
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Chris Gregory & Don Kalb ‘Value’ is the one central theme that runs throughout and conjoins all of David Graeber’s writings. This week focuses on his first book, whose original title, eventually flipped around by the editor, was The False Coin of our own Dreams: Towards an anthropological theory of value. While Chris […]
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Lost People
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Jonathan Parry & Maurice Bloch Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar is not David’s first published book, but it is based on his doctoral thesis and, in this sense, his first, major scholarly work. We are led in this discussion by Prof. Maurice Bloch and Prof. Jonathan Parry—two of David’s […]
Rafael Wainer: COVID-19: Complicity, complacency, and connections
To understand the massive world-disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic we need a sociology of complicity. Since the different waves hit the planet, we have been hearing repeatedly two crucial phrases: 1) “we are all in this together” (or the opposite: “we are not in this together”), and 2) “we are all becoming complacent to the […]
Sandro Mezzadra: Intersectionality, Identity, and the Riddle of Class
Identity and class While identity is of course a fundamental category in European philosophy at least since Aristotle, its politicization is a much more recent phenomenon. One can say that it is only in the second half of the 20th century that the development of cultural anthropology and sociology lays the theoretical ground for such […]