Holly High

It seems there is no end to David Graeber books since he died suddenly several years ago. But this latest one, As if Already Free is different. It is a small collection of wildly different papers in anthropology. They all have just one thing in common: they were influenced if not inspired by something David Graeber wrote.

Their range is breathtaking. There is a paper on Eritrean independence and the hypocrisy of the Nobel Prize committee; one on the rites of giving birth around the world; the history of national reserve banks and the evolution of national currencies; anarchist anthropology; religion in post-coup Myanmar; public universities and the plague of privatizing them; and one on morons. Eleven in all, if you include the introduction, which is a biographical sketch of Graeber’s route to fame and influence and his relationships with the authors. I can’t think of anyone else who inspired so many different views and efforts in so many different domains. It is a wonderfully varied read. Four of the papers are by the book’s editors, Holly High and Joshua Reno.

One of the papers is actually about Graeber’s Introduction to a new edition of someone else’s book. Graeber never got around to writing it before he died, but this paper imagines it. A completely different take for a paper. And it is tied in to religious precarity in post-coup Myanmar. In this paper we also learn how important imagination itself is to both Graeber and the new edition book’s author. Graeber went so far to say capitalism murders imagination. And that it is imagination that really separates humans from the rest. It is not that other beings cannot reason, but that they cannot imagine.

The editors posit that Graeber was all about dialog, and learning through conversation. He lived his own life that way, and it shows in the numerous things he had to say about a seemingly infinite number of topics. His own method, Graeber said, was to “start from some aspect ... that seems particularly bleak, depressing … some failure, stumbling block … and try to recuperate something, some hidden aspect we usually don’t notice, some angle from which the same apparently desolate landscape might look entirely different.” Which might be why his own writing was so interesting.

The inspirations can be both deep and superficial. Graeber once called himself “a professional optimist”. Which is remarkable considering his own trials and tribulations with politics in academia, and the movements he joined that he had to know could not succeed. But from them came the concept of not waiting for success, but “to live as if already free” – the title of this collection.

He also wrote that:
“To live as a rebel - in the constant awareness of the possibilities of revolutionary transformation and amongst those who dream of it – is surely the best way one can live.”
“It is plain to everyone that capitalism doesn’t work, but it is almost impossible for anyone to imagine anything else.” (Not so. I could have written a paper for them on that one, as my regular readers know.)
“The war against the imagination is the only one the capitalists have actually managed to win.”
“When one tries to bring an imagined society into being, one is engaging in revolution.”

If there were a contest among the authors as to who had the most outlandish paper, Reno’s On Morons would likely win. His own son, he says, is a moron. He doesn’t read or speak or actively participate in society; he just is. This leads back in history to the way morons were often treated - royally by kings, for example. They were used as messengers from the king because they would be unable to add further information, even under torture. They could also be entertaining, as in the king’s fool. And in some instances they were regarded as gods. The paper tours the world, showing how different societies dealt with the cognitively disabled. The mistreatment of morons is, for good reason, a constant throughout as well.

Early on, Reno links it to something David Graeber wrote: In 2004, “Millions of people watched George (W) Bush and John Kerry lock horns, concluded that John Kerry won (the debate), and then went off and voted for Bush anyway … They (Democrats) could not understand why decisive leadership was equated with acting like an idiot.”

I don’t want to review every paper in the book (setting an unreasonable precedent for myself), because this review would go on forever. Suffice it say it is a high tribute to David Graeber that he could inspire such diverse content and controversies with his simple words. Whether you agree with any of the papers or not.

David Wineberg… (mehr)