Graeber discusses Marcel Mauss’ theory of the gift as an alternative to orthodox economic assumptions about the centrality of markets and “exchange”, and Pierre Clastres’ arguments about societies that explicitly sought to avoid the formation of a State. Graeber is far more interesting when he writes about what anthropology can offer anarchism: a wider range of both social theory and observation of social practices than is available in orthodox Western theory and philosophy alone. It’s not that Graeber doesn’t know that “the discipline we know today was made possible by horrific schemes of conquest, colonization, and mass murder” (96) but he seems to think that the “vast archive of human experience” possessed by anthropologists is uninflected by these origins, and only needs to be shared more publically in order to be efficacious. Graeber’s claim that anthropology has had “an affinity to anarchism from the very beginning”, because of anthropology’s “keen awareness of the very range of human possibilities” (13) is disingenuous at best, given the tangled nature of anthropology’s origins (as both an expression of and revolt against European colonialism), not to mention its institutional investments today. Most obviously, this is apparent in the fact that Graeber never questions the interests and biases of “downwardly-studying” ethnographic researchers or participant-observers themselves. Despite all his rote Foucault-bashing, and sneering at mainstream academics as “people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment” (71), he in fact buys into the authority of normative academic “knowledge” much more than I think is necessary or justified. For I fear that here Graeber overly idealizes academia, and the discipline of anthropology in particular. This is the most upfront side of the book, but also its least convincing one. What anarchism can offer anthropology, according to Graeber, is a way out of academicist impasses, a way that anthropology might change the world, rather than merely interpret it (to use a Marxian formulation to which Graeber might well be averse here he soft-pedals the Marxist slant that was more apparent in his previous - and more traditionally academic - book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value). Each, he says, has a lot to offer the other. Graeber wants to ally the discipline of anthropology with the anarchist currents that have shown up, most recently, in the anti-globalization movement. David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is filled with interesting and provocative ideas.
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