When I am unproductive academically, I am usually productive blogically and Internetally. I generally catch up with blogs and write personal emails and pour through some online reading material. Tonight, I was reading unreasonables and was reminded of David Graeber a graduate of my department who I saw talk this fall at the Anthropology meetings in Chicago. He was lively, interesting and I wanted to read more and as usual, I forgot.

Today I found him again online and I was shocked to discover he was a politically active Anarchist.
Chicago Anthropology is productive of a surplus of high minded intellectuals, not many radicals. Good to see that they can leave here intact and get jobs. Yet of course he has commented, with wit, on the Chicago style of things here:

All this struck home to me because it brought home to me just how much
ordinary intellectual practice–the kind of thing I was trained to do at
the University of Chicago, for example–really does resemble sectarian
modes of debate. One of the things which had most disturbed me about my
training there was precisely the way we were encouraged to read other
theorists’ arguments: that if there were two ways to read a sentence,
one of which assumed the author had at least a smidgen of common sense
and the other that he was a complete idiot, the tendency was always to
chose the latter

I liked his AAA talk which was about (not) consumption. He made a classic anthropological move calling us academics in general as being ethnocentric in our assessment of consumption. He basically argued that we tend to treat everthing that is an act of using and ingestion (he used many digestive metaphors during his talk) as consumption based out of a capitalist base of sorts and even when critical scholars treated it as something different, it is alwas a deviance or resistance to as opposed to something perhaps with a different history, ontology, direction. Not capitalist consumption. In his unusual though endearing talking style, he challenged us to think beyond consumption reminding us that it does not have to be our de facto measuring stick…

His writings are blunt but multi-dimensional and unlike much academic writing you feel like you learn something. I like facts of some sort and some graspable opinion to churn through your head.

Today I read some of his material on anarchism, politics, and the academic left. I like how he introduces the anti-corporate globalization movements and direct political actions of the New New Anarchists to reflect on the guilt and strange position of seemingly left academics.:

It