EDWARDS: “What would Graeber say about this?” How often, over the past four years, have we asked that question, in need of his voice and vision? Watching Israel’s assault on Gaza, and inspired by the students organizing against it on campuses in Australia and elsewhere, I’ve been imagining how Graeber would have responded. As a fellow Jewish academic, I’ve been wondering about Graeber’s relationship to traditions of Jewish thought, and how these might have informed his vision for what the university could—and should—be, as well as his powerful critique of the dangerous weaponization of antisemitism claims.
MAURER: For me, Graeber functions like a series of favorite science fiction novels I can use to build a riff, whether I’m writing about inequality, or money and payment practices, or alternative forms of finance, like my current obsession with cooperative finance. I think some of my readers expect a certain quirkiness from me—and, for them, it’s fine for me to weave in references to speculative fiction authors such as N.K. Jemisin or Martha C. Wells, for example. For my more, ahem, staid interlocutors, Graeber is just familiar enough to serve as my touchstone, even if I might think of him as more of a “familiar” in the magical sense!
PEEBLES: I have a book under production at MIT Press that attempts to leverage anthropological theory and monetary history to find a pathway forward for “everyday activists” to fight climate change rather than relying only on corporations and governments to save us. By building locally owned “carbon banks” that would be “in the Commons,” we can build a currency infrastructure that sequesters carbon just as gold was sequestered during the gold standard. David’s fearless and lifelong pondering of whether “another world is possible” gave me the courage to take the leap with this sort of “policy-oriented” book, which can be fairly atypical for anthropology.
RENO: I am working on a new book about imagination and the weird world we live in now that is at least partly inspired by Graeber’s lifelong interest in imagination. I am also trying to find new ways to convey anthropological ideas to new audiences and through alternative means. To that end, I am writing a graphic novel with a lifelong artist friend that blends history and fiction, ethnography and magical realism to talk about a place I did some growing up in, Seneca Lake in Western New York.
STEWART: The legacy of Graeber for me personally resides in the political significance of the topics he chose to write about, coupled with the compelling quality of his writing. He is one of a small number of authors—others are Ursula K. Le Guin and George Orwell—who I consider as models of excellent writing, and for using writing to change how people think, and, thereby, to change the world.
HIGH: Graeber once described himself as “a professional optimist,” and after reading all his works, I think that rubbed off on me. Graeber showed that someone bookish and largely absorbed in seemingly arcane debates about little-known parts of the world can join much wider conversations. And he seemed to do so not despite the quirky characteristics of his discipline, field sites, or personality, but on the strength of them. He wrote as if diversity is always enriching (even if we all know how hard the realities of such conversations can sometimes be). He wrote as if already free.
