Graeber’s overall scholarship focuses on the more radical topics of economic anthropology,* including equality, power dynamics, and revolution.*
Debt is an extension of Graeber’s previous work on anthropological theories of value,* in which he questions the ability of the capitalist* system to accurately value the contributions of human beings to one another.
The anti-capitalist nature of Debt supports Graeber’s reputation as a rebel and lends intellectual strength to his political leanings as an anarchist.*
Debt: The First 5,000 Years builds heavily on David Graeber’s previous scholarship and the development of his political ideas throughout his scholarly career. It also represents a change in Graeber’s scholarly direction, in which he turns away from the pure anthropology and ethnography* (field study of a people’s culture or society) that characterized his work in most of the 2000s to revisit the economic anthropology of his first book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2001).
In many ways Debt is a logical extension of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. Debt uses one of Toward’s core arguments—the inability of the capitalist market* to accurately value human actions—as an intellectual backdrop. To underwrite his analysis of debt, Graeber musters a great deal of evidence from his previous works in anthropology and his own research.
“Anthropology seems a discipline terrified of its own potential.”
David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
One of Debt’s major themes is the argument that the capitalist system uses debt as a mechanism to perpetuate inequality and abuse. This is rooted in Graeber’s doctoral fieldwork on the island of Madagascar, where he witnessed first hand the negative effects of large amounts of government debt on economy and people. Pressure to repay the national debt served as both moral and practical justification for cutting social welfare programs and harming quality of life. Later, in 2007, Graeber would also publish Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Although a purely anthropological work with a narrow focus on Madagascar, it nonetheless introduced many of the ideas on slavery, inequality, and debt that serve as secondary themes in Debt.1
The most direct influence on Debt from within Graeber’s own body of work, however, comes from Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, Graeber’s first book, which established him as an anthropologist concerned with the issues of economic theory. The book’s basic position is that people and, by extension, their actions are the most important “products” of a society.2 The implication is that the notion that values can be established through market exchange is simply wrong: the basis for Graeber’s exploration of debt and human economies in Debt.
Graeber was already considered one of the greatest anthropologists of his generation well before the publication of Debt. His extensive ethnographic work on Madagascar, which ranged from his time as a graduate student to his publication of Lost People, was highly regarded within his field.3 After the publication of Graeber’s books Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, the British anthropologist Maurice Bloch* wrote: “[Graeber’s] writings on anthropological theory are outstanding. I consider him the best anthropological theorist of his generation from anywhere in the world.”4
Graeber’s significant body of anthropological writing on power relations, hierarchies, and activism, bookended by Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value and Debt: the First 5,000 Years, positions Graeber as a pioneering intellectual in what the anthropologist Keith Hart* calls “anthropology of unequal society.”5 Of all his work, Debt has received the most critical acclaim, winning the Bateson Book Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the Bread and Roses Award from the Alliance of Radical Booksellers.
1. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011), 4.
2. David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
3. Thomas Meaney, “Anarchist Anthropology,” The New York Times, December 8, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/books/review/anarchist-anthropology.html.
4. Maurice Bloch, “Letter from Maurice Bloch, London School of Economics” (2005).
5. Keith Hart, “In Rousseau’s Footsteps: David Graeber and the Anthropology of Unequal Society,” The Memory Bank, July 4, 2012, http://thememorybank.co.uk/2012/07/04/in-rousseaus-footsteps-david-graeberand-the-anthropology-of-unequal-society-2/.