feeling a bit crushed:

David Graeber: I only knew him a little.

His dad worked in a print shop, I read today. Like mine.

Let's remember:

Graeber was an anthropologist who had been devastated by anthropology — maybe not intellectually, but, I gathered, by his lived experience of the field.

In his alienation, I found him typical of working-class academics who went to the University of Chicago and had dealt with its classist and contradictory environment.

And by his own account (who are we to challenge it today?) he was unemployable in North America.

He sometimes characterized his own professional success in Britain as a painful exile.

So nothing would be weirder today than claiming Graeber, unironically, as a great success of anthropology, when his success, which was largely a success in left politics, in authorship and in the media, was so much IN SPITE of that field.

Graeber was a big fan of what anthropology could be; but also a living indictment of what it was.

Anyway now it's hard not to sense his absence, his irascible presence on the internet, his constitutive vulnerability.

(We quarreled over HAU, and I know I hurt his feelings, but we did make up. He wasn't at his best in internet arguments. Is anyone?)

At the same time, he had ultimately a lot of capital, a huge network on the left, and a certain aura. To recall that is not to betray the person but just to retain a certain materialist reflexivity.

Graeber was a singular figure — a working class anarchist kid by his own account, but also arguably the last renegade product of a certain kind of masculine old guard in anthropology, the Sahlins/Turner structural Marxists.

And I think some of his disappointment with anthropology was a disappointment on behalf of his own waning tradition. His ambition and rebellion were themselves structural products, I’d say. And his ambition to make it in the ivy league was always baffling.

What kind of anarchist wants to work at Yale in the first place? Yet Graeber reported being fired for backing the grad student union there. And I’ll remember him for that as much as for any of the books.