Please join us for the 1st General Assembly of World Anthropologists who are involved or interested in the recent occupy movement for global economic change that is sweeping the globe. The details of our meeting and the actions we take will be determined by the consensus process during general assemblies that is being practiced by all of the occupations. David Graeber, one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street, will be on hand to help facilitate and participate in the initial assembly.

It figures that David Graeber would go and get himself (more) famous by the time I actually am in the same place as him

also this seems dorky and I think that anthropologists just want to do some twinkling participant observation

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors. [via]

Love Graeber but I am more interested in reading this than his work on debt. Also, as much as I like his work as activist work, it seems like sometimes his political inclinations interfere with his anthropology. Note to self.

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. Odd though this may seem, in most important ways you are probably already an anarchist — you just don’t realize it. [via]

What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call ‘the economy’. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence - but also, the systematic threat of violence - maintained by the contemporary state. [via]