Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: David Graeber, an economic and political anthropologist who became one of the field's most influential public voices, died in Venice on September 2, 2020, at the age of 59 (Figure 1).His daring theories and wide-ranging ethnography excited the public with academic ideas.A committed activist, he played a central role in the anti-globalization and Occupy movements of the late 1990s and early 2010s.A New Yorker, Graeber grew up in a union-sponsored apartment complex called Penn South in Manhattan.Modeled on England's Rochdale cooperatives and consisting of 15 21-story apartment towers built with financing from the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), this working-class, left-wing housing development opened in 1962, the year after Graeber was born. 1 Graeber's father, Kenneth Graeber was a printer and socialist who, as a University of Kansas student, volunteered in the Spanish Civil War, driving an ambulance for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.His mother, Ruth Rubinstein Graeber, was a Polish Jewish dressmaker and ILGWU activist who in the late 1930s, sang and acted on Broadway in a musical comedy revue, Pins and Needles.It was produced and performed by ILGWU workers and became an unlikely smash hit, running on Broadway for more than two years (and being staged for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the White House) before touring nationally (Fischer, 2021).In this New York milieu, Graeber was nurtured by a rich hybrid of socialist and anarchist philosophy, union-forward folk music, and high-culture artistic and intellectual participation.He was a child prodigy.In his early teens, Graeber translated Mayan hieroglyphs and was encouraged to the point of presenting his work to a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The curator, impressed by Graeber, helped him to receive a scholarship for high school at the elite prep school Phillips Andover Academy.He was a boarding student at its cloistered New England campus.Throughout his life, Graeber moved between contrasting class settings, and he grappled productively with the unresolvable tension between them (High & Reno, 2023.).After his first year at Sarah Lawrence College, Graeber transferred to the State University of New York at Purchase for his undergraduate studies, majoring in anthropology.During city vacations, he explored the punk and alternative indie music scene which was burgeoning in the late 1970s and early 1980s.He would also escape to his family's summer beach cottage on Fire Island off the coast of Long Island.
Source: American Anthropologist
DOI: 10.1111/aman.28020
Author: Yancey Orr
Institution: Smith College
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,240
OpenAlex ID: W4403162587