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Chris Knight: Wrong About (Almost) Everything
A review article on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021. The Dawn of
Tag : FocaalBlog
21 min read
9 min read
Maka Suarez: Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH
Let me begin by saying “this is a thought experiment”; a phrase David often used, and I find useful. In this talk I’d like to propose an
13 min read
Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne and James Taylor: State and crisis in Sri Lanka and Thailand: Hearing but not listening in the Theravāda Buddhist world
Although historically and geographically diverse, but sharing religious cultural roots, contemporary Sri Lanka and Thailand are both characterised by
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Keith Hart: Comment on ‘Debt: The Last 5,000 Years’
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years was published in summer 2011. In August-September of that year, he took part in the first New York City
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Don Kalb: Constituent Imagination versus the Law of Value: On David Graeber’s ‘Anthropological Theory of Value’
Image 1: Book Cover. The last two decades in anthropology would have been dramatically less exciting without David Graeber. Given David’s
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Chris Gregory: What is the false coin of our own dreams?
I confess that the first time I met David I was not impressed. It was in 2006 at a conference in Halle. David gave a 50-minute summary of what was to
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Jonathan Parry: The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar
Image 1: Book cover of Lost People David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar began life as his University of
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Rafael Wainer: COVID-19: Complicity, complacency, and connections
Image 1: Social distancing signs. Photo by ©Acabashi CC-BY-SA 4.0 To understand the massive world-disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic we need a
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Sandro Mezzadra: Intersectionality, Identity, and the Riddle of Class
Identity and class While identity is of course a fundamental category in European philosophy at least since Aristotle, its politicization is a much
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Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive
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Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgos Poulimenakos: The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%
In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the climate change
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Steven Sampson: Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism
QAnon, Deep State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the
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Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer: Siberia, Protest and Politics: Shaman Alexander in Danger
In 2021 a modest long-haired Sakha man named Alexander Gabyshev was arrested at his family compound on the outskirts of Yakutsk in an unprecedented
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Paul Stubbs: Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Image 1: Shows Tuzla Plenum, 2014 (Photograph by Tamara Opačić from H-Alter, 17 February 2014,
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Abram Lutes: Anatomy of an Autogolpe: On the consolidation of Nayib Bukele’s power in El Salvador
For the first time since El Salvador’s mid-20th century military dictatorship, a single political party dominates both the legislative and