January 1, 2013
David Graeber Live Chat / Reddit AMA
by Melville House
List price: $22.00
David Graeber, author of the award-winning Debt, the First 5,000 Years, is participating in a Reddit AMA session on Monday, January 28th.
You can join him and ask questions here: Reddit AMA with David Graeber
UPDATE regarding the live video chat:
We attempted to have a live stream with David from London, but we had some technical problems with the internet connection. We’d like to try again at some point, so if you leave questions below, we’ll use those for the rescheduled video chat. Thanks.
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Join David Graeber for a Live Chat / Reddit AMA 
22 Comments
In your recent “Debt: The First 5000 Years” book, you spend an ample amount of time detailing specific cultures, notably concerning Madagascar peoples and their interactions.
In his recent book, “Language, the Cultural Tool”, Daniel Everett goes into his time spent with the Pirahã tribe of South America, where not only are the concept of numerals foreign to them, they’re simply non-applicable to the way they live their lives.
Why this has relevance is that in your book, you refer to common usage of social interaction terms, such as “Thank You” in Portuguese which is ‘Obrigado’(spoken in Brazil which some of these tribe members understand):
In English, “thank you” derives from “think,” it originally meant, “I will remember what you did for me”-which is usually not true either-but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English “much obliged”-it actually does means “I am in your debt.” The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from “mercy,” as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your benefactor’s power-since a debtor is, after all, acriminaly saying “you’re welcome,” or “it’s nothing” (French de rien, Spanish de nada)-the latter has at least the advantage of often being literally true–is a way of reassuring the one to whom one has passed the salt that you are not actually inscribing a debit in your imaginary moral account book.
so, I have 2 questions:
1) Given that even between these two types of groups of humans, there are striking differences between how language is structured, along with how much importance debt (and social currency) play, do you think that there are human-wide notions of debt, even if one set of people don’t use numerical representations of it?
2) How could we trace these types of cultural relationships (primarily dealing with debt) via word usages or other tools based upon linguistics or etymology?
My students are reading “Direct Action” this semester as their ethnography. You talk of language and rituals of activist culture, and I wonder if you might say a bit about those aspects of Idle No More and the Québec Casserôles so they can apply it to current movements.
What do you say to people like Doug Henwood who say that your work on debt is of only limited use to activists in capitalist societies because it fails to address the way debt works in those societies (which is unique).
In your book you employ the word ‘class’ in a number of ways – middle-class, aristocratic class, etc – but usually to discuss the cultural and moral dimension of a stratified society. I would like you to comment on what your book offers to class theory, specifically to the Marxian relational definition, and why you choose this more Bourdieuian approach. Are you conflating class and status?
Critical theory or Anarchism as the philosophy for contemporary global revolution, and why?
Why are anthropologists obsessed with neoliberalism?
What effect did the government surveillance of Occupy leaders and spokespeople have on the movement? Were the organizers threatened and harassed? Another way to say this is: To what degree did the main coordinators drop out because they were harassed by surveillance and monitoring?
_________
P.S. The form appears not to have labels in the three boxes above. I had to view the page source to figure out what to put where.
My question is about gifts given by former patrons (who are now émigrés) to their former clients. (This example is drawn from my fieldwork in rural Haiti.) It is common and usually expected for returning émigrés, usually visiting for summer vacations, to give small gifts of cash to local peasants who formerly worked or sharecropped for them. In more than one case, the émigré failed to be discrete about the amount given (or told others how much was given) leading the peasant to burn or destroy the money in a very public display. When this occurs, peasants complain that émigrés fail to show peasants respect. What is your view about what is going on here?
It should be noted that Everett is highly controversial for positing an extraordinary example of linguistic difference which would break much of our understanding of language universals in a language that he claims only he–a white Christian missionary whose biases go basically unexamined in his own work–can speak, and no other person outside of this community. If taken seriously, his work would represent such a sea change in linguistics that any honest scholar in his shoes would rush to teach other linguists the tongue and have his conclusions confirmed.
As it stands, Everett’s interviews which claim to establish structural differences in Pirahã are of disputed usefulness at best, and leave much to be desired; alternate explanations are often not even addressed long enough to be dismissed, despite their large number. His consistency and legitimacy is nearly as shaky as the Bible which, I suspect, has a greater influence on him than linguistic fact ever will.
As for the live chat: I wonder if Mr. Graeber has an opinion about how syndicalist unions like the IWW can best contribute to today’s struggle and to working and oppressed classes generally?
I was hoping that you could expand on your critique of the orthodox marxist notion of the free wage contract being the “foundation” of capitalism. As you’re well aware of Von (no less!) Ingo Stützle faulted Debt for lacking a definition of capitalism since, he says, you ignore the wage labour relation that distinguishes capitalism from non-capitalist societies .
And perhaps you could suggest some reading (books, articles…) for someone who wants to delve a little deeper into the issue.
Kindly, Kristoffer
I was wondering what your opinion is of Michael Albert/Robin Hahnel’s “participatory economics” proposal, and “anarchist planning” ideas more generally. What about top-down, parliamentary attempts following an (arguably) similar logic? i.e. some interpretations of Venezuela’s Bolivarian movement
Does the libertarian left need to be talking about these kind of blueprints in order to convince those who are scared to risk what little they have to take a radical perspective?
I will focus on two quite broader questions, as this is a very limited frame:
1.) Do you perceive the debate that arose after your book as a frutiful outcome to yourself? Why or why not? What was the most inspiring discourse to you personally?
2.) As your book adresses a general audience, do you think that more anthropologists should concentrate on a wider public debate?
Thank you in advance!
Why are some things possible, and other things not?
I am a student struggling with conflicting views on Anarchism and militancy. I believe there should be a classless, stateless society that allows for equality and liberation from our forms of oppression. I am wondering, as an occupier and as a daughter of an affluent family, how do you see us bridging together classes in the face of a class struggle?
What do you think about the possibility of establishing a space outside of the established academy/University where people could do critical research and also be able to eat/not freeze to death/etc.?
David, is there a danger that because your book makes readers aware of what you call “communist” moments of interpersonal relations—giving someone the time of day, for instance—that the self-consciousness of those moments threatens to sabotage them? That is, does thinking about moments as standing outside of or as exceptions to the exchange model somehow then problematize them by placing them in a relationship with that model?
Question from the reddit thread:
If you were to take a shot in the dark, what kinds of social changes do you think we can expect within the next ~100 years?
The question I’ve been struggling with for a while is do anarchist and horizontalist social structures scale? And if so how? Can you provide some examples from your anthropological background?
The main issue I come up against is information entropy and dissemination. Hierarchal/arborescent systems are very good at disseminating information and resources without a lot of dissipation losses and time delays. However a horizontalist system has a greater ‘surface area’ and much more ‘information evaporation’. There also appear to be limits on the scale of interpersonal reflexive social structures such as the famous ‘Dunbars Numbers’.
Does having a more horizontal society mean limiting the scale of structures of power? And if so how do smaller, more benevolent societies avoid predation by larger hierarchally organized social organisms?
Have you ever heard of the Skills Gap and do you think that this, combined with worker collectives and worked-owned factories, could potentially lead to a political shift? I have the United States in mind, but I’m also asking your opinion on this in the global context. Certain aspects of Spain’s revolutionary years have inspired me.
Today’s “revolutionaries” seem all too tied up in the fleeting drama of police confrontations, theatrics, and begging the 1% to not do things. While art and public expression are necessary tactics, they are clearly not enough. A small minority actually knows how to operate the means of production, and they are not 1%ers. Yet the modern labor movement (particularly in the USA) seems to be in a dismal state. Thoughts?
Hi,
So lets be honest here, were you or not, in your opinion, denied a contract renewal from Yale for being an Anarchist and what does this say about universities in America and political diversity? Why, in your opinion, is Anarchy so frowned upon by the educational ‘elite’ who purport to possess a plentiful palette of ideas, whether political or not?
David
I confess I still need to read your book, but I have question regarding the title. Frans de Waal and others have demonstrated that we evolved to remember debts and obligations millions of years ago. Aren’t you really talking about the last 5000 years, not the first?
Hey David! I loved your recent talk “On Bureaucratic Technologies & the Future as Dream-Time” based on your Baffler essay. In it you mention “Stop Work” movements in the 70′s comprised of angry workers who were ready for robot factories to liberate from them from menial labour as they’d been promised. Do you have any more information on this? I’ve only been able to find some vague Yippie slogans from the time…
Also, what do you make of the erosion of the public sphere over the past century in relation to Occupy and the future of workplace and community organization. Seems to me Occupy showed us that:
a. we’re pretty bad / rusty at interacting with one another in a horizontal fashion
b. the state initially reacted with it’s own violence but then wised up and dumped as many anti social jerkwads as they could to foment burnout in encampments
As many of us have rescinded back into our internet holes, what’s next? Was Grasci right? Is building effective culture as important as building organizations for attack? Are the Dialectical Materialists just armchairs who comfort themselves with the “inevitability of communism” in order to avoid real participation in struggle?