Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Graeber (1961-2020) was an American anthropologist and self-proclaimed anarchist since the age of 16. He received a BA in anthropology from SUNY Purchase (1984) and a PhD from the University of Chicago (1996). While working on his dissertation, Graeber conducted anthropological fieldwork in the highlands of Madagascar, which he references in Debt. At the time of his death, he was a professor at the London School of Economics.

He was heavily active in the Alter-Globalization movement, a cooperative movement designed to protest the direction and consequences of neo-liberalism. Graeber was also involved in planning meetings that helped to set up Occupy Wall Street, a point that he notes in the Afterword.

Graeber’s anthropological training and anarchist perspectives comes through in Debt. He took a comparative approach to understanding the history of debt using anthropological, archaeological, economic, historic, and ethnographic evidence. In fact, Debt is styled after many of the classic ethnographies. The early 20th-century French anthropologist Marcel Mauss served as a source of inspiration for Graeber. He even told himself while writing the book that he wanted to write the sort of book Mauss would have. Within Debt, Graeber is highly critical of capitalism. Part of his reason for writing the book is to push readers to imagine a society no longer confined by capitalism and patriarchy.

Graeber was an extremely prolific writer, publishing 17 books and over 100 articles and papers. He also gave numerous interviews. Debt received several accolades, including the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Gregory Bateson Prize in 2012 and the Alliance of Radical Booksellers inaugural Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing in 2012.