David Graeber's Anthropology of Human Possibilities

Abstract

This essay offers a close reading of David Graeber's posthumously published magnum opus The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), which he co-authored with David Wengrow. The essay engages critically with the concepts of “humanity” and “freedom” that The Dawn of Everything advances. Highlighting how Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) foreshadows The Dawn of Everything in the kind of radical social theory both books advance, the essay proposes that we treat Graeber's scholarship as an anthropology of human possibilities.