David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American and British anthropologist, left-wing and anarchist social and political activist. His influential work in social and economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
Born in New York to a working-class family, Graeber studied at Purchase College and the University of Chicago, where he conducted ethnographic research in Madagascar under Marshall Sahlins and obtained his doctorate in 1996. He was an assistant professor at Yale University from 1998 to 2005, when the university controversially decided not to renew his contract. Unable to secure another position in the United States, Graeber entered an "academic exile" in England, where he was a lecturer and reader at Goldsmiths' College from 2008 to 2013, and a professor at the London School of Economics from 2013. (Full article...) (read more...)