AN ANTHROPOLOGIST THAT I ADMIRE

Hello everyone again and for the last (sad) time, this time I come to tell you about an anthropologist I admire, David Graeber.

My admiration for him starts first because he is considered (and for me too) one of the most important contemporary anthropologists, his contributions to political and economic anthropology are important for academics, due to his studies of the origins of barter and money giving a different view to the hegemonic discourse, focusing his study on the importance of war in the origins of barter and money. Another reason and the most important one for which I admire him is his concordance in what he studies and the criticisms he makes with his political activism in favor of social rights and anti-capitalist movements, being very active always until the day of his death.

As for his life. He was born in 1961 in New York being always close to political activism because his father fought in the Spanish civil war with the Republican army and his mother was a member of the international union of garment workers. He earned his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago and served as a professor at the University of London and Yale University, where he was fired for political reasons. He was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World union and led the Occupy Wall Street movement. His most outstanding books were Bullshit Jobs and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. He died in 2020 from internal bleeding and acute pancreatitis.

a picture of David Graeber

David Graeber at a protest with industrial workers of the world T-shirt.