Editors: Becky Bowers, Megan Laws, Giulio Ongaro, and Alpa Shah

Sometimes, the dead can be more alive than the living. With David Graeber, one year on, it certainly feels this way.

The contributions to this feature pay tribute to his legacy by beginning to unravel the generous gifts of writing he left us with. These conversations first took place at the LSE Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory, which, in the Michaelmas Term of 2021, was devoted to honouring David’s writings by bringing two leading anthropologists together each week to discuss one of his major works.

David was a hugely influential public intellectual. He not only produced work that spanned an extraordinarily wide variety of topics that mattered to people, but he also wrote in an accessible and engaging language that broke with the constraints of institutionalised academia.

David revelled in his success but, above all else, he wanted to be seen as an anthropologist and to be critically engaged as such. This feature is designed to do just that—to cast a critical lens on some of his most compelling ideas, beginning a project of analysis that will occupy anthropologists for many years to come. David’s work was wide-ranging, from debt to pirates, bureaucracy to bull-shit jobs, kings to rewriting the teleological assumptions of the history of humanity. In this feature, we will discuss a few of his important works: from his ethnographic research in Madagascar, to his later writing on value, debt, anarchism, myth, bureaucracy, and bullshit jobs.