Rather, he seeks to link academic anthropologys body of knowledge (about 'actually-existing self-governing communities' in the world today) to the utopian desires of global anarchism. What a shame that he won't be around in the states for a while. David Graebers highly engaging contribution to social theory doesnt claim to say anything particularly 'new' about anarchist social movements.
Philosophy, political science, economics, tend only to use the vocabulary that stems from the Western experience: Greek, Latin, or German. He makes the point that in anthropology one uses a vocabulary taken from all parts of the globe: mana, taboo, totem. He then points out that the anarchist inspired new-internationalist "anti-globalization" movement is drawing upon these traditions of "true" democracy.įinally, he makes a good argument that anthropologists are very qualified (as people who have studied a diverse range of ways of living that even the most well educated philosophy academic could barely imagine) to make radical assertions and participate in the creation of a world that allows many worlds. Rather than dictate what shoud be done as a Marxist might, Graeber analyzes, in a brilliant way, what humans already do, and highlights their anarchist tendencies by reframing them as such. Professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1998 to 2007. The third part of the book, concentrating on the debunking of the Orientalist myth of the Western world vs. Then he spends a good deal of the book defining sets of theories, papers, and books that he would like to see written. He is insightful, bringing to light the tendency of Marxists to name their sects after the people who wrote them (amusingly the list evolves from state leaders to academics), and the tendency to name anarchist sects by the manner in which the sect organizes. At the start of the book, Graeber discusses the differences between anarchism and Marxism as liberatory philosophies, a worthy and interesting topic.
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