David Graeber

Updated at: Feb. 24, 2021, 9:59 a.m.

David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 — September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), and his leading role in the Occupy Wallstreet movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.

Born in New York to a working class Jewish family, Graeber was exposed to radical left politics from a young age. He studied at Purchase College and the University of Chicago, where he conducted ethnographic research in Madagascar under Marshall Sahlin and obtained his doctorate in 1996. He was an assistant professor at Yale University from 1998 to 2005, when the university controversially decided not to renew his contract before he was eligible for tenure. Unable to secure another position in the United States, he entered an "academic exile" in England, where he was a lecturer reader at Goldsmiths' College at the University of London from 2008 to 2013, and a professor at the London School of Economics from 2013.


Related Books

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory