Thread for discussing David Graeber (and maybe other cool anthropology and money history and activism related stuff)

So his "Debt" book has been on my list for a while. I recently listened to a couple of podcasts of him - he's slightly hard to follow in lecture although in an engaging sort of way. He talks a bit like Ira Glass crossed with Buster from Arrested Development, and he always seems to be so bursting with ideas that it's hard for him to express them all.

The "money didn't replace bartering" thing is obviously kind of fascinating and there was a lot of other stuff in what I listened to about the relationship between coinage, military, debt, taxes etc. that I would like to spend more time with.

Bump.

he's great

I think debt and the moral issues associated with it is actually probably the most important meta-political subject at this point in history, it encompasses a lot of things at once (europe, housing market, bank bailouts, student loans, etc. etc.) as such his book was perfectly timed and he hits a lot of things that aren't traditionally addressed by the field of economics, which doesn't have much room for morality w/i a mathematical model

I think he's extraordinarily 'relevant' thinker right now, even if he ultimately only hits a few notes again and again, they're notes that need to be hit

When I tried to get his book at Greenlight in Ft Greene (sold out) a woman randomly asked me why I was interested in it. It turned out she was an anthropologist who was "curious about why people were reading him outside academia." Lol she mad.

haha yeah one point he makes a lot is how isolated academics are from activism these days and that's probably a pretty good example

his book "possibilities" is really great, one of the books that's made me properly stop and reframe my thinking, without bullying me into its ideas - should really take the time to look at Debt, which sounds fascinating.

havent read Debt yet but i saw him speak at a launch for it a few weeks ago and have been thinking about it a lot ever since. a lot of the ideas are so simple yet so hard/modern life has left us so unprepared to answer, "why can't you just pardon all of this debt?"

he also some gave some really satisfying answers to things ive always wondered about the origins of currency. definitely a great speaker and a total dude

this is a good short free greab read my friend who brought me along to the launch showed me http://www.ramshackleglory.com/paradigm14.pdf

so I'm not an expert but I get the sense that for the most part he's not himself a ~revolutionary thinker~, but a lot of the time someone who's pushing (relatively) overlooked stuff from the past (marcel mauss esp.) but when it comes to 'making stuff happen' - I don't think you have to be a revolutionary thinker. you do need to be someone who's good at framing issues and he is.

there are an huge global problems right now that could be solved if it weren't for contemporary cultural attitudes w/r/t the morality of debt and it's not an issue that's gonna go away anytime soon so I think he's well-positioned to be one of the more important public figures for the left.