„Er machte seine Dissertation in Chicago bei Marshall Sahlins, der die Jäger und Sammler als «ursprüngliche Überflussgesellschaft» feierte. Und er setzte seine akademischen Einsichten bei der Protestbewegung Occupy Wall Street auf der Strasse um. Das führte allerdings dazu, dass ihn die Yale University 2007 nicht mehr lehren liess.“ – nzz.ch
Opus magnum eines Rebellen
„Als David Graeber 2019 in Venedig starb, empfing nicht eine respektvoll erschütterte Welt die Nachricht von seinem Tod. Wie wenige hat Graeber Wissenschaft und soziale Aktion zusammengeführt. Dieses Gemeinschaftswerk legt davon nicht bloß Zeugnis ab – es legt dazu den Grundstein.“ – freitag.de
Bahnbrechend!
„There’s a whole new picture of the human past and human possibility that seems to be coming into view, [David Wengrow] said. And it really doesn’t resemble in the slightest these very entrenched stories going around and around.” – nytimes.com
„Inequality is not the price of civilisation“
„The Dawn of Everythingcertainly follows a long tradition of anti-statistanthropology. An early example was Mutual Aid (1902) by the anarchist geographer Prince Kropotkin, which provided an alternative to the fashionable evolutionary histories of his era, and defended ‘savage‘ peoples against the harsh judgments of imperialists and Marxists alike. And in his 1972 essay The Original Affluent Society, the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wondered whether the Kalahari foragers, with their two- to four-hour working day, were really so much worse off than the nine-to-five office or factory worker.“ – theguardian.com
Gewaltiges Werk
„The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), which Graeber cowrote over the last decade with the archaeologist David Wengrow, was published posthumously this year. [...] the Rousseauian ‘state of nature’ is the myth to be shed, and what the two call the ‘Indigenous Critique’ of ‘western’ societies offers an enduring, and heartening, means to enact social and cultural innovation in the present. No recent book is gaining faster traction in the artworld right now. Artists, take note.“ – artreview.com
