45 Facts About David Graeber

David Rolfe Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist.

David Graeber 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.

David Graeber attended protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001 and the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, and later wrote an ethnography of the movement, Direct Action.

David Graeber died unexpectedly in September 2020, while on vacation in Venice.

David Graeber's parents, who were in their forties when David Graeber was born, were self-taught working-class Jewish intellectuals in New York.

David Graeber later worked as a plate stripper on offset presses.

David Graeber was an anarchist from the age of 16, according to an interview he gave to The Village Voice in 2005.

David Graeber received his master's degree and doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he won a Fulbright fellowship to conduct 20 months of ethnographic field research in Betafo, Madagascar, beginning in 1989.

In 1998, two years after completing his PhD, David Graeber became assistant professor at Yale University, then associate professor.

In May 2005, the Yale anthropology department decided not to renew David Graeber's contract, preventing consideration for academic tenure, which was scheduled for 2008.

The Yale administration argued that David Graeber's dismissal was in keeping with Yale's policy of granting tenure to few junior faculty.

David Graeber suggested that Yale's decision might have been influenced by his support of a student of his who was targeted for expulsion because of her membership in GESO, Yale's graduate student union.

In December 2005, David Graeber agreed to leave Yale after a one-year paid sabbatical.

On May 25,2006, David Graeber was invited to give the Malinowski Lecture at the London School of Economics.

David Graeber applied for more than twenty, but despite a strong track record and letters of recommendation from several prominent anthropologists, never made it past the first round.

David Graeber himself interpreted his exclusion from American academia as a direct result of his dismissal from Yale, likening it to "black-balling in a social club", and arguing that the charge of "uncollegiality" glossed a variety of other personal qualities, from his political activism to his working-class background, that marked him as a trouble-maker within the academic hierarchy.

From 2008 to 2013, David Graeber was a lecturer and a reader at Goldsmiths College of the University of London.

David Graeber was a founding member of the Institute for Experimental Arts in Greece.

David Graeber gave a lecture with the title "How social and economic structure influences the Art World" in the International MultiMedia Poetry Festival organized by the Institute for Experimental Arts supported by the Department of Anthropology of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

David Graeber is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams.

David Graeber conducted extensive anthropological work in Madagascar, writing his doctoral thesis, The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar, on the continuing social division between the descendants of nobles and the descendants of former slaves.

David Graeber contributed essays on the Shilluk and Merina kingdoms, and a final essay that explored what he called "the constitutive war between king and people".

David Graeber was working on a historical work on the origins of social inequality with David Wengrow, published posthumously as The Dawn of Everything.

From January 2013 until June 2016, David Graeber was a contributing editor at The Baffler magazine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he, too, participated in the public debate about futures of technology.

Charles Kenny, writing in the political magazine Democracy, claimed that David Graeber sought out data that "fit the narrative on the evils of neoliberalism" and challenged or criticised data which suggested otherwise.

However, Schmid expressed minor frustrations with the sheer length of the book, and the fact that David Graeber raises many claims and examples which he does not go on to develop in full.

David Graeber responded that these errors had no influence on his argument, remarking that the "biggest actual mistake DeLong managed to detect in the 544 pages of Debt, despite years of flailing away, was that I got the number of Presidential appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong".

David Graeber dismissed his other criticisms as representing a divergence of interpretation, truncation of his arguments by DeLong, and mistakes in the copy editing of the book.

David Graeber sees such jobs as being typically "concentrated in professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers".

David Graeber was a member of the labor union Industrial Workers of the World, protested at the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002, supported the 2010 UK student protests, and played an early role in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

David Graeber became a strong advocate of the democratic confederalism of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria after visiting the region in 2014, often drawing parallels between it and the Spanish Revolution his father fought for in the 1930s.

In November 2011, Rolling Stone credited David Graeber with giving the Occupy Wall Street movement its theme: "We are the 99 percent".

David Graeber wrote in The Democracy Project that the slogan "was a collective creation".

David Graeber spent the next six weeks involved with the burgeoning movement, including facilitating general assemblies, attending working group meetings, and organizing legal and medical training and classes on nonviolent resistance.

David Graeber argued that the Occupy Wall Street movement's lack of recognition of the legitimacy of either existing political institutions or the legal structure, its embrace of non-hierarchical consensus decision-making and of prefigurative politics made it a fundamentally anarchist project.

David Graeber tweeted in 2014 that he had been evicted from his family's home of over 50 years due to his involvement with Occupy Wall Street.

David Graeber added that others associated with Occupy had received similar "administrative harassment".

In November 2019, along with other public figures, David Graeber signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, calling him "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election.

David Graeber advocated for a boycott of The Guardian newspaper by fellow left-wing authors after alleging that the paper published distortions against Corbyn for years.

David Graeber denounced what he claimed was the weaponisation of antisemitism for political purposes, and The Guardians alleged role in undermining Corbyn in the 2019 election, which, according to Graeber, resulted in a landslide victory for Boris Johnson.

David Graeber asserted that The Guardian only publishes progressive authors in order to gain credibility with its readership, but its editorial policy is at odds with socialist politics.

David Graeber's loss is incalculable, but his legacy is immense.

David Graeber died suddenly from necrotic pancreatitis on September 2,2020 while on vacation with his wife and friends in Venice.

David Graeber died during the COVID-19 pandemic and instead of a funeral, his family organized an "Intergalactic Memorial Carnival" of livestreamed events that took place in October 2020.

David Graeber's wife, Dubrovsky, attributed the pancreatitis to COVID-19, saying they both had strange symptoms for months beforehand, and she said there was a connection between COVID-19 and pancreatitis.