David Graeber’s Lasting Influence on Anthropology and Activism

We both recall the exact moment when we heard that U.S. anthropologist and activist David Graeber had died in Venice, Italy, at the age of 59.

I (Holly) remember the cold of the brown leather sofa where I was sitting. I was at home in the chilly highlands south of Sydney and felt my phone buzz. “I just wondered if you saw that,” read the text from a former student. I clicked on the article link they’d sent. My first reaction was denial. “Is this a hoax?” I shot back, slightly irritated. But my student gently pointed out that Graeber’s agent had confirmed it.

I (Josh) remember blasting the air conditioning at the start of another hot day in September 2020. I was happy for once to be stuck inside prepping online courses during the pandemic, trying to set up Zoom permissions to keep out trolls from virtual lectures. There were so many disembodied exchanges in those days with co-workers and students who I never saw face-to-face, pretending like it was normal.

Then I got the news. Mutual friends had told me just days before Graeber was recovering from an illness. The virtual house of cards came crashing down to earth.

By the time of his death in 2020, Graeber had become an important public intellectual. Outside of anthropology, he became known for his popular salvos on work and democracy—including the breakthrough publication Debt: The First 5,000 Years—and his activism within the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. His posthumously published The Dawn of Everything, an ambitious reconsideration of human history co-written with archaeologist David Wengrow, became an international bestseller. More trade books of Graeber’s writing were released posthumously in 2023 and 2024.

But we both met Graeber before he became so well known. In fact, it was Graeber who first introduced us, over drinks in a London pub. We are both sociocultural anthropologists, like Graeber, broadly concerned with understanding how structures of economic inequality and power play out in people’s everyday lives. Josh first became interested in Graeber’s work during his doctoral fieldwork as a paper picker at a Michigan landfill, then he later ended up as his colleague at Goldsmiths, University of London. Holly first reached out to Graeber when she was organizing a conference on debt at Cambridge University.

At the time of his death, we were co-editing a book series at Pluto Press called “Anthropology, Culture, and Society.” We found ourselves talking often about Graeber’s passing. The pain and persistence of our grief surprised us, especially given that neither of us would claim to have been close friends of his.

Looking back, it seems obvious that we felt the loss so deeply in part because of what his work meant for us personally and professionally as anthropologists. But at the time, we just knew we wanted to talk: about him, about anthropology, and about where to go from here.

Q: How has reading Graeber’s work impacted you as a person and a scholar? And do you have a favorite piece of his writing?

HOLLY HIGH: My favorite piece of writing by Graeber is The Dawn of Everything. It sings with David’s curiosity, ambition, excitement in ideas, and belief in anthropology’s vitality and importance. It came out when we were part of the way through writing As If Already Free, so it holds a special significance for me. Living in Australia, I could only get hold of the audio book at first. I turned my compost heap while listening on double speed. That was a strange experience. Then I received my print copy. Having listened to it first, it was easier for me to see the overall argument from the start, which added to the enjoyment.

GEORGINA STEWART: My favorite is Chapter 6 of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, titled “Marcel Mauss Revisited.” I found it after I had been reading the substantial archive on the Māori concept of hau, and it’s a brilliant synopsis of those decades of debate about what had become an infamous Western misreading of an Indigenous concept. [1] [1] Editor’s note: For an in-depth discussion of the concept of “hau,” see Stewart’s article, “The ‘Hau’ of Research: Mauss Meets Kaupapa Māori.” Coming from outside anthropology, reading this debate was new and fascinating to me, as a Māori person and speaker of Māori. I would have loved the opportunity to correspond with David about it.

JOSH RENO: Graeber loved anthropology, especially long-forgotten books and debates. When I was seeking graduate programs in 2001, scholars I deeply respected told me at the time that the discipline was dead or dying. It was a revelation to read Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. While he made a lot of claims, it was Graeber’s belief that our discipline mattered that stood out to me. That the history we’d accumulated was not a ruin better left forgotten but a garden we could return to, that had something important to contribute to the world.

Q: How do you hope As If Already Free will be received?

BILL MAURER: I hope people read it as moving beyond hagiography and into critical practice. That is, I hope people use the chapters to understand other sites for the building of alternative forms of scholarly and social engagement. Most idealistically, I hope they read it as a how-to guide or roadmap to experiment in the construction of alternative social formations. That’s a tall order, I realize, but the times demand we stretch, even if in uncomfortable ways.

GUSTAV PEEBLES: David’s untimely passing still feels raw and unjust. We all know that he had so much more to say, so much more to achieve. As If Already Free brings together a diverse array of scholarship inspired by his work, all of which points toward more hopeful—and possible—futures. I hope, first, that the book will inspire others to turn to David’s scholarship to continue probing and prodding the injustices of today’s world. And second, that it will ever-so-gently push anthropology deeper into pragmatic policy debates, rather than our more typical stance of pure critique.

MICHAEL EDWARDS: I recently met up with a former teacher of mine who was also a former colleague of Graeber’s. We spoke about the ways in which Graeber was, for some, not always the easiest departmental colleague, something discussed elsewhere. But we also spoke about one important way he served the wider discipline: his ability to bring new students to anthropology. I’ve been teaching the introductory anthropology course at the University of Sydney this past semester and have been struck by how many students signed up as a direct result of having read something by Graeber. My hope is that this book can extend that legacy.

Q: What are you working on now? In what ways does Graeber’s legacy continue to influence your life and work?

EDWARDS: “What would Graeber say about this?” How often, over the past four years, have we asked that question, in need of his voice and vision? Watching Israel’s assault on Gaza, and inspired by the students organizing against it on campuses in Australia and elsewhere, I’ve been imagining how Graeber would have responded. As a fellow Jewish academic, I’ve been wondering about Graeber’s relationship to traditions of Jewish thought, and how these might have informed his vision for what the university could—and should—be, as well as his powerful critique of the dangerous weaponization of antisemitism claims.

MAURER: For me, Graeber functions like a series of favorite science fiction novels I can use to build a riff, whether I’m writing about inequality, or money and payment practices, or alternative forms of finance, like my current obsession with cooperative finance. I think some of my readers expect a certain quirkiness from me—and, for them, it’s fine for me to weave in references to speculative fiction authors such as N.K. Jemisin or Martha C. Wells, for example. For my more, ahem, staid interlocutors, Graeber is just familiar enough to serve as my touchstone, even if I might think of him as more of a “familiar” in the magical sense!

PEEBLES: I have a book under production at MIT Press that attempts to leverage anthropological theory and monetary history to find a pathway forward for “everyday activists” to fight climate change rather than relying only on corporations and governments to save us. By building locally owned “carbon banks” that would be “in the Commons,” we can build a currency infrastructure that sequesters carbon just as gold was sequestered during the gold standard. David’s fearless and lifelong pondering of whether “another world is possible” gave me the courage to take the leap with this sort of “policy-oriented” book, which can be fairly atypical for anthropology.

RENO: I am working on a new book about imagination and the weird world we live in now that is at least partly inspired by Graeber’s lifelong interest in imagination. I am also trying to find new ways to convey anthropological ideas to new audiences and through alternative means. To that end, I am writing a graphic novel with a lifelong artist friend that blends history and fiction, ethnography and magical realism to talk about a place I did some growing up in, Seneca Lake in Western New York.

STEWART: The legacy of Graeber for me personally resides in the political significance of the topics he chose to write about, coupled with the compelling quality of his writing. He is one of a small number of authors—others are Ursula K. Le Guin and George Orwell—who I consider as models of excellent writing, and for using writing to change how people think, and, thereby, to change the world.

HIGH: Graeber once described himself as “a professional optimist,” and after reading all his works, I think that rubbed off on me. Graeber showed that someone bookish and largely absorbed in seemingly arcane debates about little-known parts of the world can join much wider conversations. And he seemed to do so not despite the quirky characteristics of his discipline, field sites, or personality, but on the strength of them. He wrote as if diversity is always enriching (even if we all know how hard the realities of such conversations can sometimes be). He wrote as if already free.