He appealed to the possibilities that a classroom held for collapsing social inequalities we encounter on a daily basis, if only for a temporary moment. In a way both quiet and intentional, his approach that day was one positioned against the hierarchies that define academia and society more generally. There was no general conclusion he wanted to transmit, and he was unconcerned with coming across as an authority in his field. Graeber was a storyteller and a listener-comfortable fielding questions with good humor, but equally comfortable receding into the background to let a student speak at length about their work. Under normal circumstances, this kind of approach can lead to disarray and disinterest, but with Graeber, it became more interesting and meaningful. He then opened the floor to questions, or, more precisely, conversation. Graeber was introduced, and he proceeded to speak very briefly about his work on ethnography and social movements, a project that would become Direct Action: An Ethnography (2009).
True to an anarchist sensibility, there was no formal lecture as such. I knew little about Graeber at the time except that he had controversially been denied promotion at Yale, had a reputation for espousing anarchism, and had a foot in African Studies. It was an afternoon event, attendance was low, and there were maybe fifteen people at the most in the room, graduate students primarily. This was before Occupy Wall Street and before the publication of his now classic books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). I had only one opportunity to see David Graeber speak, over a decade ago now when I was teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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