Betafo, a rural community in central Madagascar, is divided between the descendants of nobles and descendants of slaves. Anthropologist David Graeber arrived for fieldwork at the height of tensions attributed to a disastrous communal ordeal two years earlier. As Graeber uncovers the layers of historical, social, and cultural knowledge required to understand this event, he elaborates a new view of power, inequality, and the political role of narrative. Combining theoretical subtlety, a compelling narrative line, and vividly drawn characters, Lost People is a singular contribution to the...

If anthropology consists of making the apparently wild thought of others logically compelling in their own cultural settings and intellectually revealing of the human condition, then David Graeber is the consummate anthropologist. Not only does he accomplish this profound feat, he redoubles it by the critical tasknow more urgent than everof making the possibilities of other people s worlds the basis for understanding our own. Marshall Sahlins, University of Chicago
Graeber s ideas are rich and wide-ranging; he pushes us to expand the boundaries of what we admit to be possible, or...

Anthropologist David Graeber undertakes the first detailed ethnographic study of the global justice movement. The case study at the center of "Direct Action" is the organizing and events that led to the one of the most dramatic and militant mass protests in recent yearsagainst the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. Written in a clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal conversations in coffee shops to large spokescouncil planning...

Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods--that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era,...

Available in English for the first time, anthropologist Carlo Severi s "The Chimera Principle" breaks new theoretical ground for the study of ritual, iconographic technologies, and oral traditions among non-literate peoples. Setting himself against a tradition that has long seen the memory of people without writing which relies on such ephemeral records as ornaments, body painting, and masks as fundamentally disordered or doomed to failure, he argues strenuously that ritual actions in these societies pragmatically produce religious meaning and that they demonstrate what he calls a chimeric...

A criticism that limits itself to capitalism is too superficial, Ocalan argues, and turns his eyes to the underlying structures of civilization. Rethinking the methods of understanding culture, politics, and society, he provides the tools for what he calls a sociology of freedom.

In this work, Abdullah Ocalan distills 35 years of revolutionary theory and praxis and 10 years of solitary confinement in...