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I had reason to recall & cite Graeber just a few days ago, as I wrote a critical essay on Thomas Piketty's latest book, which does not go as deeply into the historical origins of inequality as did Graeber (and the radical tradition in archaeology and anthropology more generally).
That tradition, before Graeber, was always associated, for me, with two great names: V. Gordon Childe and D D Kosambi, who deserve to be rediscovered. It is remarkable that we are looking today to the deepest social origins of inequality in order to make sense of our situation.
Graeber was a popularizer and perhaps a populist, but one who also took ideas and his responsibility to convey them to a broad public seriously. I heard him, at the Festival of Ideas in Ferrara, Italy, some years ago. A packed amphiteatre listed to his every word.
He was perhaps the most successful public anthropologist of his generation. One might argue that others, such as Jared Diamond, stand in an anthropological tradition of a kind, but are not accredited anthropologists.
Nor did they draw on the social and cultural anthropological tradition equally with archaeology, as Graeber attempted to do.
Jack Goody was perhaps in a similar tradition, and also had materialist insights, but did not write with clarity, or speak with attention to public concerns, in the way that was necessary for broad public success.
Marvin Harris, like Jared Diamond, was a materialist, but without the concern with exploitation and hierarchy in the radical anthropological and archaeological tradition.
What is needed: to apprehend materialist insights without becoming a reductionist, recognizing the role of material conditions: - environment and technology - but also that social relations have an independent role to play.
Piketty's work suffers from the opposite bias of Harris / Diamond: strangely devoid of materialist insights for a 'world historical' analyst -- concerned with social exploitation but voluntarist in its conception of how it can be overcome.
Yes, it *all* matters, but neither is it a mish-mash. There are hierarchies in social explanation, although these too are context-bound.
I have just been reading an essay by Samuel Johnson which argues for the opposite of the Latin maxim, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. Instead, he urges us to tell the whole truth about the dead, that we may be better biographers.
Graeber had, for my taste, too simplistic a view of economics and economic discourse, and did not take on the various reasons that finance (and therefore) debt emerges, and is likely to play a role in any complex society.
The solution of a jubilee, while tempting, was precisely populist, not based on an analytical approach to the problem. But it did have the benefit of capturing the public imagination, and providing a focused demand.
He understood that in the end academics in the social sciences are also, willy nilly, political actors. The question is therefore always in part, although never only, "Whose side are you on?".
Two cheers for David Graeber.
