Debt: The First 500 Posts (a thread for discussing David Graeber)

Hugely disappointed that @anthropologytod chose to put this nasty ad hominem attack on the late David graeber in as the frontispiece to this issue, w @davidwengrow s reply shoved in at back. This is not a book review, it’s dancing on a grave pic.twitter.com/T0LXXOsWbz

— Brenna Hassett (@brennawalks) March 10, 2022

article and response here https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678322/2022/38/1

Started The Dawn of Everything the other day. Apart from the main thrust I'm enjoying the things they throw out there without further analysis, like middle ages europe was, globally, an 'obscure and uninviting backwater', or that the western idea of 'a government of bureaucratic officaldom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams' came from china, where it existed for centuries before being adopted by the west. The second chapter dealt with such a handful of different, related, questions, and tackled them from so many different angles, that it was hard to grasp the big picture, but it's getting a bit more focussed now. I should probably be taking notes to appreciate it fully though.

I highly recommend The Dawn of Everything, it's hugely entertaining, educational, and enlightening. I am very much there for the anticapitalism/anarchism but, not to trivialise, without it - certainly without the first couple of chapters and their rather confusing notion of the origin of inequality - it would make a great pop science book on early civilisation.

They are disdainful of others' simple classification schemes e.g. old/middle/new kingdoms of ancient egypt, but very keen on their own, in particular their
trinity of domination (control over violence (sovereignty), control over information (bureaucracy), and charismatic competition (politics)) and
trinity of freedoms (freedom to move, freedom to disobey, freedom to reimagine society) (and I feel like there was a third one making a trinity of trinities but I can't recall it any more). These taxonomies are certainly thought provoking but it feels a bit like they cherry pick their data or stretch definitions, especially when claiming their societies fit into patterns of implementing one, two, or three of the forms of domination. But in a way that makes it more fun to engage with.

I've started on Debt. In the first chapter he quotes this Steven Wright joke (differently worded but same idea) to make some point about debt and violence. i don't get it (as a joke), please explain:

I owed my friend George $25. For about three weeks I owed it to him. The whole time I had the money on me -- he didn't know it. Walking through New York City, 2:30 in the morning and got held up. He said, "Gimme all your money." I said, "Wait a minute." I said, "George, here's the 25 dollars I owe you." The the thief took a thousand dollars out of his own money and he gave it to George. At gunpoint he made me borrow a thousand dollars from George.

is the joke-teller a person and is their friend a bank and is the thief the government and is it that when the government finds that the person it aims to tax has only $25 it is happy to give a huge sum to the bank in order that it can be loaned to the person thereby increasing the government's taxation income ? idgi either

The point he's making in the book is that who owes what to whom - whether something is a loan or a liability - is (or can be) dependent not on simple economics but on the balance of power (and the threat of violence). But - I just don't get it as a joke! I love Steven Wright but if I heard that in a set I'd just go... what?

Some years ago I was in a band and we made a record, which entailed expenses for studio time and mastering and CD pressing and sleeve printing.

At the time I was a wealthy person and I paid for a bunch of these things up front, but I still wanted to be reimbursed. There were a bunch of different expenses and incomes involved, because we also had paid gigs.

The keyboard player was a mathematician, and did some wizard shit where he like, turned to the guitarist and said, "okay, you give her $16 (pointing to the bassist). I will give you $4. Now everyone gives Puffin $22."

To this day I don't quite understand what happened, and it's possible that someone got screwed, but in the moment I just went with it because he sounded really confident.

The joke up to the part where he repays George as they’re being robbed is pretty standard Borscht-belt comedy. The coda about the $1000 is Wright pushing the joke into slightly surreal (and less funny) territory IMO.

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is a gem

at the beginning of this book, he mentions the barter thing and instead posits that what came first was a "gift economy" -- which sadly reminds me first and foremost of Burning Man -- but fortunately the book is mostly about anarchists and organizing as opposed to an economic argument I am somewhat skeptical about.

Gift and status and subsequent understandings were something conquistadors got heavily confused by in several stories I've heard.

Partially through having an overconfident idea of their own status

I need to read Matthew Restall's work on the interaction between Spain and Mesoamerican infrastructure because he talked about that in interviews i heard a couple of months ago.
Montezuma etc giving great wealth as gift to show how very wealthy they were and conquistadors seeing it as an act of fealty not something with an expectation of being matched and possibly increased.

& part of the gift giving economy was to escalate the value of the gift given leaving the other party needing to match it or be in debt I think. Think I saw Gaeber hismelf talking about that in a talk from around teh time Debt came out.

yeah ... that's part of the awkwardness I felt around that term. Like, there are obligations and cultural assumptions around the value of the gift in these cultures, at least that's how I read it. And then you have the term appropriated by Burning Man (and contemporary things like it) where the "gift economy" is just supposed to be about "giving" and not as part of a transaction. So I feel like it is something often misunderstood.