David Graeber's rhythm of developing thought: On poetics,imagination,and estrangement

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of David Graeber's work following the methods proposed by Antonio Gramsci of exploring Marx's work in search of “the leitmotif, the rhythm of developing thought, must be more important than single random statements and detached aphorisms.” Adopting this Gramscian approach, I argue, allows us to dispel frequent critique of Graeber's alleged idealism by recovering how Graeber's reflection on possibility and alternatives operated by decentering the distinctions between the ideal and the material, while honing in the categories of imagination and estrangement. This move recovers Graeber's work as a project of developing anthropology as the art of the possible, an enterprise directed at recovering, understanding, and offering social, economic, political, and conceptual alternatives.

Introduction

Approaching David Graeber's work comprehensively, even a few years after his passing, remains a titanic undertaking, due to the sheer breadth of his output, his characteristic curiosity, his use of unexpected sources, his dedication to argumentative play and encyclopedic virtuosity, and his tendency toward provocative conversations over statements. As a result, scholars engaging his work often end up focusing on a specific concept, a particular text, or a distinct line of thought and thinking along it, selecting some aspect of this large oeuvre that resonates or clashes with their own.

This is evident in the two main collections that, since Graeber's premature departure, have offered a general overview of his work (Bowers et al., 2021; High and Reno, 2023). The first is a collection of essays hosted by the Focaal Blog, resulting from a series of commemorative lectures that took place in 2021 at the London School of Economics Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory (Bowers et al., 2021). The collection provides an essential, and much needed, guide to navigating Graeber's opera but does so by sectioning his thinking along themes—lost people, value, debt, anarchist anthropology, myth, bureaucracy, and bullshit jobs—which loosely follow his main books chronologically and provide an assessment, often positive, at times critical, of his contributions to each theme. The second collection, also the result of a “slow workshop” (High and Reno, 2023: iix) that took place on Zoom over 2021, takes a different approach. Aiming at recovering Graeber's project of “imagining new ways to live and not only to think” (2023: ix), this text stresses the dialogical nature of his thinking, and each chapter offers a conversation between the authors’ own works and Graeber's, punctuated with bibliographical memories, which provide a fascinating kaleidoscope of his thinking as refracted through that of others.

While incredibly valuable in showing the expanse and significance of Graeber's contributions, both texts, although differently, end up favoring a selection and engagement with specific concepts, texts, and moments over a holistic approach to his production. In this article, instead, I propose to follow a different approach, one similar to that adopted by Gramsci in his readings of Marx, in which the objective was “the search for the leitmotif, for the rhythm of developing thought” (Gramsci, 1949: 77), over the focus on individual texts, statements, or concepts. ¹ But why is such an approach necessary and what do we gain by following it?

My argument here is that much of the recent critical engagement with Graeber's work, both inside and outside anthropology, has revolved around a critique of his supposed “idealism” (Gatenby, 2015; Huato, 2015; Kalb, 2014, 2021, 2024; Mollona, 2022; Lindisfarne and Neale, 2021; Scheidel, 2022) often voiced from inside a Marxist tradition, and a pushback against such accusations (Andueza, 2021; Kaczmarski, 2019; Rossi et al., 2024). These lines of critique, and their responses, focused on specific texts—Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (Graeber, 2001), Debt (Graeber, 2012b), and The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021) above all—missing a larger leitmotif: his refusal of the division between material “infrastructure” and ideal “superstructure” in an attempt to develop what he called a “genuine materialism” (Graeber, 2016: 6), in which the ideal is material in so far as it generates concrete actions. Graeber (2006: 70–71) states this clearly in his Turning Modes of Production Inside Out:

what has passed for “materialism” in traditional Marxism—the division between material “infrastructure” and ideal “superstructure”—is itself a perverse form of idealism. Granted, those who practice law, or music, or religion, or finance, or social theory, always do tend to claim that they are dealing with something higher, more abstract, than those who plant onions, blow glass or operate sewing machines. But it's not really true. The actions involved in the production of law, poetry, etc., are just as material as any others. Once you acknowledge the simple dialectical point that what we take to be self-identical objects are really processes of action, then it becomes pretty obvious that such actions are always (a) motivated by meanings (ideas) and (b) always proceed through a concrete medium (material), and that while all systems of domination seem to propose that “No, this is not true, really there is some pure domain of law, or truth, or grace, or theory, or finance capital, that floats above it all”, such claims are, to use an appropriately earthy metaphor, bullshit. […] A genuine materialism, then, would not simply privilege a “material” sphere over an ideal one. It would begin by acknowledging that no such ideal sphere actually exists. This, in turn, would make it possible to stop focusing so obsessively on the production of material objects—discrete, self identical things that one can own—and start the more difficult work of trying to understand the (equally material) processes by which people create and shape one another.

Adopting a Gramscian approach and directing our attention to the rhythms of Graeber's developing thought therefore allow us to recover such “genuine materialism” and recover how Graeber's reflection on possibility and alternatives operated by decentering the distinctions between the ideal and the material, while honing in the categories of imagination and estrangement. This move allows us to understand Graeber's work as a project of developing anthropology as the art of the possible, an enterprise directed at recovering, understanding, and offering social, economic, political, and conceptual alternatives. As Grubačić and Vodovnik (2021: 2) have noted, “Even a cursory glance at his opus reveals a coherent and systematic analysis of something that we could bluntly call ‘possibilities’”. Beginning with their incipit, I focus on the role that the categories of imagination and estrangement played in Graeber's proposal of anthropology as an antidote to the neoliberal project of eliminating alternatives and the TINA (there is no alternative) discipline.

To recover this line of thought, I adopt a certain serendipity and an admission of theoretical eccentricity only fitting to address Graeber's work, his pace, and his ability to recruit thoughts and thinkers almost anywhere. The journey I propose in this article, like any journey worthy of the name, begins in unexpected places and develops through the appearance of almost magical helpers. In my case, two in particular, far removed from the corner of the academy occupied by David Graeber: the first Aristotle, and one of his reflections on the difference between historians and poets; the second Carlo Ginzburg, and one of his usual erudite disquisitions on the relationship between real, fake, and false sources in historiography and on the role of estrangement as a literary and philological technique. Each of them will set us on course to our search for the leitmotifs of Graeber's thought beyond debates around its idealism.

Possibilities and imagination

In the ninth chapter of Poetics, Aristotle embarks into a brief reflection on the differences between the poet and the historian. “It is not the function of the poet,” the philosopher reminds us,

to relate what has happened, but what may happen […] The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. (Aristotle, 2008: 17)

Although seemingly far removed from Graeber's work, this reflection can help us rediscover his role as a poet of anthropology not because, as Aristotle said, he wrote in verse, but rather because his attention was directed more to the possible than to what has happened, more to providing spaces for imagination than to describing and analyzing the present.

This reflection may seem to strengthen a critical tradition that has seen Graeber's work as a form of idealism (Kalb, 2014, 2021, 2024). Yet, starting from Aristotle's distinction between poet and historian may help us recover Graeber's poetic moves without seeing them as a commitment “to an idealist approach with blinding ardor” (Scheidel, 2022: 21) but rather as one of the features of his “genuine materialism” (Graeber, 2006: 71) and grasp the potential of such an approach. In this sense, judging Graeber's opera for not being the work of a historian means missing the leitmotif of his intellectual and political project.

Recovering it, on the contrary, requires not to focus on specific texts or concepts but rather begin from the role of political activism in the formation of his academic thought. Since his earliest essays on money, theory of value, and anarchism (Graeber, 1996, 2001, 2002), Graeber always saw activism and academic work as parts of a unified project aimed at opposing his sworn enemy: neoliberalism, seen not only as an economic project but as a symbolic and political one. Although solidly in the know of Marxist debate, Graeber was after all a student of Marshall Sahlins and Terence Turner, and with his masters refused to see historical materialism, or rather economistic materialism, as the basis, and its symbolic and cultural components as a superstructure, and shun such dualism by focusing rather on actions, the terrain in which meanings and concrete mediums, the ideal and the material meet. In this sense, neoliberalism was for him, even more than a specific way of organizing the relationship between markets and state forces, a symbolic apparatus, a machine for the suppression of alternatives. In the first pages of a collection of essays titled Revolutions in Reverse (Graeber, 2011a), (Graeber, 2011a: 5) offers a seemingly eccentric definition of neoliberalism:

Neoliberal capitalism is that form that is utterly obsessed with ensuring that it seems that, as Margaret Thatcher so famously declared in the 1980s, “there is no alternative.” In other words, it has largely given up on any serious effort to argue that the current economic order is actually a good order, just, reasonable, that it will ever prove capable of creating a world in which most human beings feel prosperous, safe, and free to spend any significant portion of their life pursuing those things they consider genuinely important. Rather, it is a terrible system, in which even the very richest countries cannot guarantee access to such basic needs as health and education to the majority of their citizens, it works badly, but no other system could possibly work at all.

Over time, Graeber reconstructs, the neoliberal project has been reduced to its ultimate essence, “not an economic project at all, but a political project, designed to devastate the imagination” (Graeber, 2011a: 6). In other words, for Graeber, the neoliberal project is revealed in its effects and not in its stated goals. Although it presents itself as a project of subjugating all political considerations to the diktat of economic growth,

global economic performance over the last thirty years has been decidedly mediocre. With one or two spectacular exceptions (notably China, which significantly ignored most neoliberal prescriptions), growth rates have been far below what they were in the days of the old-fashioned, state-directed, welfare-state-oriented capitalism of the fifties, sixties, and even seventies. (Graeber, 2013: 4)

On the contrary, (Graeber, 2013b: 4) argues, if

we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. […] They have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system.

Neoliberalism for Graeber therefore is configured, to put it in Aristotelian terminology, as an anti-poetic machine, whose actions aim at the systematic suppression of anything else that can happen, an apparatus aimed at the generation and preservation of what Boyer and Yurchak have called “cynical reason,” the belief that any radical change, no matter how desirable it may be, will never come to pass (Boyer and Yurchak, 2010). This anti-poetic machine, not only typical of neoliberal thought but also visible in contemporary academic debate, oriented toward skepticism and the radicalization of any effort to imagine alternatives, has always been Graeber's real intellectual, academic, and political enemy, and his work is a concrete and scholarly attempt to challenge it, even at the cost of losing ethnographic specificity and historical accuracy, of sacrificing, at least in part, the function of the historian to the altar of that of the poet.

“The last thirty years,” he wrote more than a decade ago, “have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures” (Graeber, 2011a: 31–32). His work provided a twofold response to this apparatus: on the one hand, revealing its role and showing the production of forms of stupidity and hopelessness essential for its preservation; on the other, reconstructing a space for imagination, using anthropological knowledge and social movement practices as sources of inspiration. These two projects are probably the most consistent leitmotifs of Graeber's work. We see them in his critique of wage labor and its origin in slavery (Graeber, 2006), in his debate on the nexus between value and values and their constitutive power (Graeber, 2001), in his analysis of direct actions (Graeber, 2009), in his reflections on debt and money (Graeber, 2012b), in his critique of bullshit jobs (Graeber, 2018), as well as in his criticism of state forces and bureaucratic machinery (Graeber, 2015).

Through these two interpretive keys, we can organize his entire body of work. This dual task, as proposed by Graeber, includes not only an analytical and critical component, typical also of the Marxist avant-garde he consistently rejected (Graeber, 2004), but also a practical and proactive one. In Graeber's vision, this duality is anchored in the deep relationship between violence (both symbolic and material), the suppression of alternatives, and imagination. This is a fundamental node of his thought, one that echoes across many of his writing, albeit often in a convoluted manner, atypical for his usual clarity. Let's pause for a moment and try to unravel this relation, firstly by parsing out the various meanings of imagination used by Graeber and then by exploring the role of anthropological work in relation to them.

The concept of imagination, as many have noticed, is central to Graeber's work but is often mobilized with different meanings. To attempt to disentangle them, let us start with his words in Utopia of Rules (Graeber, 2015), specifically in a chapter where he offers an extended version of an argument, he had already presented in his 2006 Malinowski Lectures (Graeber, 2012a). Graeber proposes an analytical and historical distinction between two forms of imagination: one immanent, the other transcendent. The word “imagination” can mean so many different things.

In most modern definitions imagination is counterposed to reality; “imaginary” things are first and foremost things that aren't really there […] Still, this way of thinking about imagination is relatively new, and continues to coexist with much older ones. In the common Ancient and Medieval conception, for example, what we now call “the imagination” was not seen as opposed to reality per se, but as a kind of middle ground, a zone of passage connecting material reality and the rational soul […] It's only after Descartes, really, that the word “imaginary” came to mean, specifically, anything that is not real: imaginary creatures, imaginary places (Narnia, planets in faraway galaxies, the Kingdom of Prester John), imaginary friends. (Graeber, 2012a: 90–91)

This, for Graeber, is the “transcendent notion of imagination,” a view that opposes imagination to reality and makes it independent of both temporal and spatial dimensions. In other words, transcendent imagination is not influenced by reality, nor does it necessarily influence it in turn.

The search for alternative possibilities, so central to Graeber's poetic project, does not, therefore, derive from this understanding of imagination. As he himself argues, this work

is much closer to the old, immanent, conception. Critically, it is in no sense static and free-floating, but entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world, and as such, always changing and adapting. This is equally true whether one is crafting a knife or a piece of jewelry, or trying to make sure one doesn't hurt a friend's feelings. (Graeber, 2012a: 91–92)

The imagination that neoliberalism attacks, and that Graeber's work seeks to reclaim, thus corresponds to this second understanding: an immanent or, in other words, realist imagination that produces material realities and concretizes reason and thought into action.

To recapitulate, Graeber recovers two opposing conceptions of imagination: a transcendent one that stands in opposition to reality, and therefore idealistic, and an immanent one that directs action and therefore becomes a necessary step for creating concrete material realities—a “constituent imagination,” a term he adopted from the Italian autonomist tradition (Graeber, 2007c, Kalb, 2021, 2024). This second understanding is the one employed by Graeber, the one invoked by Aristotle, the one under attack by the neoliberal project, and the one that does not assume a distinction between the ideal and the material but rather see imagination as a necessary component of any material production. The replacement of this second understanding with the first, or at least the confusion between the two, is itself, according to Graeber, a historical process, ² a product of industrial capitalism that, like other present categories and practices, preserves traces of its previous life, offered as potential alternative paths.

“It was precisely in the mid- to late-eighteenth century,” Graeber (2015: 92) reconstructs,

which saw the origins of industrial capitalism, modern bureaucratic society, and the political division between right and left, where the new transcendent concept of imagination really came to prominence. […] But insofar as the imagination became a residual category, everything that the new order was not, it also was not purely transcendent; in fact, it necessarily became a kind of crazy hodgepodge of what I’ve been calling transcendent and immanent principles. On the one hand, the imagination was seen as the source of art, and all creativity. On the other, it was the basis of human sympathy, and hence morality.

Here is where Graeber's dualistic categorization of transcendent and immanent imagination seems insufficient to contain his thoughts. As made evident by examples such as creating a knife and empathy toward a friend, two distinct senses of immanent imagination seem to emerge: on one hand, the imagination that mediates between thought and action, helping us imagine and thus create a knife or a piece of jewelry; on the other, a form of interpersonal imagination that allows us to empathize with the other and understand them, or at least not offend them. Here, a third meaning of imagination emerges, one that Graeber fails to analytically distinguish but continuously uses: an immanent but “identifying” imagination. This is the ability to imagine the other's point of view, the foundation of all social relations of care and support. Most human relations, he says,

particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies—are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view. This is what I’ve already referred to as “interpretive labor.” (Graber, 2015: 68)

This is a central point for Graeber. If constituent imagination is, so to speak, equally distributed among humans and under attack in neoliberalism, identifying imagination is unfairly demanded of those who are victims of this violence and becomes part of structural violence itself. “Women everywhere” Graeber (2015: 70) comments, “are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women”. Graeber (2015: 69) calls these relationships “lopsided structures of imaginative identification”, and says they are the product of structural violence that relegates the subordinates the subjugated to perform enormous “interpretive work” and carry out “the work of understanding how the social relations in question really work” (Graeber, 2015: 71). “The situation is complicated,” Graeber (2011a: 42) reminds us in Revolution in Reverse, “by the fact that systematic inequalities backed by the threat of force—structural violence—always produce skewed and fractured structures of the imagination. It is the experience of living inside these fractured structures that we refer to as ‘alienation’”.

Here, Graeber's work and his attention to imagination take on a deeper meaning—both from an intellectual perspective and from a political one. Not only are these forms of imagination and their connections to structural violence and alienation reconstructed, but this pat aims to open up a space for immanent imagination, both constituent—addressing possible alternatives—and identifying—combating alienation through the appreciation of interpretive work. The analytical and political project is nothing short of ambitious.

“All forms of systemic violence,” Graeber (2004: 11, 34) wrote in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, “are (among other things) assaults on the role of the imagination as a political principle, and the only way to begin to think about eliminating systematic violence is by recognizing this” and “counterpower is first and foremost rooted in the imagination”. In this sense, anthropology becomes for him not only an antidote to the suppression of alternatives perpetrated by neoliberalism but also to its resulting alienation, a poetic machine capable of addressing and mobilizing both forms of imagination, especially in conversation with concrete political action. Here is where Graeber's (2011a, 34–35) utopian thinking is stronger in its faith, as he declares, that

we are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It's just a matter of time. Certainly, the first reaction to an unforeseen crisis is usually shock and confusion; but after a bit, that passes, and new ideas emerge. It shouldn't be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. For the moment the problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them.

We are far from the cynical reason we talked about at the beginning and instead in the territory of Aristotelian poetics, the office, in other words, not only to describe things that actually happened but also what can happen.

If we accept with him that immanent imagination—both in its constituent and identifying meanings—is the territory on which neoliberalism operates as a political project and the one on which a counter-project can develop, the next question is what techniques Graeber adopted to carry out this work. To provide an answer to this question, in Graeberian style, I will again start from an unusual place: an essay titled Tolerance and Commerce, published by Carlo Ginzburg in the collection Thread and Traces: True, False, Fictive (2012).

Estrangement and de-familiarization

Ginzburg's essay, an erudite discussion of Auerbach's reading of Voltaire, begins with a page from Voltaire that would undoubtedly have piqued Graeber's interest. In the sixth of his philosophical letters, Voltaire describes the London Stock Exchange.

Enter the London Stock Exchange, that more respectable place than many a court; you will see the deputies of all nations gathered there for the service of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohammedan and the Christian deal together as if they were of the same religion, and apply the name of infidel only to those who go bankrupt; there the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist, and the Anglican accepts the Quaker's promise. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies, some go to the synagogue, others go to drink; one goes to have himself baptized in a great basin in the name of the Father, through the Son, to the Holy Ghost; another has his son's foreskin cut off and Hebrew words mumbled over him which he does not understand; others go to their church to await the inspiration of God, their hats on their heads, and all are content. (Ginsburg, 2012: 96)

Analyzing this passage, Ginzburg (2012: 99) invites us to observe its narrative structure and note the use of the technique of estrangement, “a literary process which transformed something familiar—an object, a behavior, an institution—into something strange, senseless, ridiculous”. This literary process, Ginzburg (2012: 99) demonstrates, is present throughout Voltaire's work, from the philosophical letters to Micromegas, and it draws on a long historical tradition rooted in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations in which, speaking of the laticlave, the band worn by Roman senators, he wrote, “This garment with its purple border is nothing but sheep's wool impregnated by fish blood”.

The technique is the same as that adopted by Voltaire: the reduction of people and events to their essential components and the making of the most obvious actions into “strange, opaque, absurd, as if they were observed through the eyes of an outsider, of a savage, or of an ignorant philosophe, as Voltaire defined himself” (Ginsburg, 2012: 99). Ginzburg reconstructs that this technique came to Voltaire not from the Latin author but rather from England through Swift's writings. In a passage where the author of Gulliver's Travels provides an inventory of items found in Gulliver's pockets compiled by two Lilliputians, Swift lists:

A great silver chain, with a wonderful kind of engine at the bottom. We directed him to draw out whatever was at the end of that chain; which appeared to be a globe, half silver, and half of some transparent metal; for on the transparent side, we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn made an incessant noise like that of a watermill. And we conjectured it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships. But the latter hypothesis is more likely. (Ginsburg, 2012: 100–101)

Ginzburg offers a comparison between this description of a pocket watch and another passage in Voltaire, where a Quaker speaks of holy wars. “Our God,” Voltaire has the Quaker say,

who has ordered us to love our enemies and to suffer without complaining, certainly does not want us to traverse the seas to go and slit the throats of our brethren simply because some assassins dressed in red and sporting caps two feet tall are enrolling their citizens making noise beating two little sticks on some tightly stretched donkey skin. (Ginsburg, 2012: 99)

Contrasting these two passages, the Italian historian and philologist shows the parallelism between Swift's and Voltaire's operations: “Swift transforms an object of everyday life into something sacred; Voltaire transforms a sacred event into something ordinary” (Ginsburg, 2012: 101).

In the context of contemporary anthropology, it is hard not to hear in this discussion the echo of one of the most common definitions of anthropological epistemology: that of making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic. Although this expression is nowadays often repeated in manuals more as a cliché than a real heuristic project, if we begin to trace its origin, Aristotle's reflections on poetics, Ginzburg's analysis of estrangement, and the role of this process of familiarizing the exotic and exoticizing the familiar in anthropology begin to slot within a single landscape, where Graeber's work, and his call to place imagination and the search for alternatives at the center of the anthropological project, also find a place.

But let us proceed somewhat systematically and try to develop a brief history of the idea of making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic. In this journey, an essay by Robert Myers (2011) titled The Familiar Strange and the Strange Familiar in Anthropology and Beyond will be our guide. In this short text, the American anthropologist traces the origins of this expression back to the world of romantic poetry, particularly in the work of the German poet Novalis, the pseudonym of the philosopher Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995: 161). For Novalis, this process of estrangement and de-familiarization was at the heart of romantic poetry, which he defined as

the art of appearing strange in an attractive way, the art of making a subject remote and yet familiar and pleasant [which] gives a mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unknown to the familiar and an infinite significance to the finite. (Myers, 2011: 7)

This idea quickly spread, and the project of de-familiarization became part of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought in the German, American, English, and Russian worlds. A similar formulation appears again in relation to poetic art in an essay by Samuel Coleridge, who in 1817, commenting on the work of his friend William Wordsworth, explains that his proposal was

to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. (Coleridge, 1907: II, 6)

The same observation reappears a few decades later in Nietzsche's Gay Science, this time applied to philosophy rather than poetic art. Nietzsche writes: “The familiar is what we are used to, and what we are used to is the most difficult to ‘know’—that is to view as a problem, to see as strange, as distant, as ‘outside us’” (Nietzsche, 2001: 215). Shortly thereafter, a similar formulation echoes across the Atlantic in an essay by William James in 1911 titled Some Problems of Philosophy. The empiricist philosopher writes: “Philosophy, beginning in wonder, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange and the strange as if it were familiar” (Wilshire, 1984: 2).

It is not only in the Anglo-Saxon world that this reflection takes root. In Russia, it resurfaces in the heart of Formalism through the writings of Viktor Shklovsky (Boym, 1996). In his essay Art as Technique (Shklovsky, 2017), repeatedly cited by Carlo Ginzburg in the chapter we started from, Shklovsky offers an analysis of the process of de-familiarization.

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged […] Art removes objects from the automatism of perception. (Shklovsky, 2017: 10–11)

In this, Shklovsky (2017: 11) sees Tolstoy as a model:

Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time […] For example, in “Shame” Tolstoy “defamiliarizes” the idea of flogging in this way: “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and “to rap on their bottoms with switches,” and, after a few lines, “to lash about on the naked buttocks.” Then he remarks: Just why precisely this stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other—why not prick the shoulders or any part of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the feet in a vise, or anything like that? I apologize for this harsh example, but it is typical of Tolstoy's way of pricking the conscience. The familiar act of flogging is made unfamiliar both by the description and by the proposal to change its form without changing its nature. Tolstoy uses this technique of “defamiliarization,” constantly.

Here, Shklovsky touches on a central point: de-familiarization as social criticism, as the “pricking of the conscience.” These reflections, as reconstructed by Ginzburg, reach Bertolt Brecht through Sergey Tretyakov and become fundamental for the development of his Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), a use of estrangement not only as a form of de-familiarization and opening of imagination—“stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them” (Brooker, 1994: 191, 193)—but also as a form of cultural critique close, as Ginzburg tells us, to the technique of the reflector used by Voltaire (Ginzburg, 2006; 120). It is in this triple function of narrative structure, imaginative operation, and cultural criticism that the technique of estrangement travels from poetry to philosophy, literary criticism, and anthropology, helping us complete our journey and bringing us closer to David Graeber.

In a conference in 1990, Melford Spiro recalled how reading T.S. Eliot's essay on Andrew Marvell had sparked a lightbulb in his head (Eliot, 1950). Eliot wrote in the essay that in Marvell's verses, there is “making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, which Coleridge attributed to good poetry” (Eliot, 1950: 259). Reading it, Spiro (1990: 46–48) felt a moment of recognition and reflected on how Eliot's characterization of “good” poetry also fits “good” anthropology and anthropologists, in their three roles of teachers, scholars, and cultural critics. While elsewhere in the intervention, Spiro questioned whether this mission was still at the center of anthropology as a scholarly project; he maintained its centrality for anthropology as a cultural critique (Spiro, 1990: 51). This observation echoes Marcus and Fisher's (1986) words in Anthropology as Cultural Critique, in which they position de-familiarization and estrangement as essential techniques for this project. “Disruption of commonsense, doing the unexpected, placing familiar subjects in unfamiliar, or even shocking, contexts,” reconstruct the two anthropologists, “are the aims of this strategy to make the reader conscious of difference” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986: 137).

Here, our reflections and the paths we have followed so far begin to converge and map a conceptual landscape in which the work of David Graeber emerges. In Ginzburg's analysis of Voltaire, the idea of estrangement as a form of political criticism comes to the fore, echoing Shklovsky's treatment of Tolstoy and their connection to Bertolt Brecht's work. In William James's words, we grasp the connection between this work of estrangement and immanent imagination, both identifying and constituent. Finally, in both Spiro's and Marcus and Fisher's reflections, we see the historical depth of the use of estrangement in anthropology as a form of cultural, social, and political criticism and the role of this discipline as an archive of alternatives. These three reflections are central to the Graeberian project. “Anthropologists,” Graeber reminds us, “are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of human experience, of social and political experiments no one else really knows about” (Graeber, 2004: 96–97).

These spectral zones are always the fulcrum of the moral imagination, a kind of creative reservoir, too, of potential revolutionary change. It's precisely from these invisible spaces—invisible, most of all, to power—whence the potential for insurrection, and the extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments, actually comes. (Graeber, 2004: 34) ³

Accessing these spaces and unleashing their imaginative potential is, in Graeber's work, the result of processes of estrangement and de-familiarization that take shape in three forms, separated here for analytical clarity but often overlapping in his writings.

The first form is to learn from other societies as archives of alternatives and spaces for which to denaturalize the familiar. His work on slavery in Madagascar (Graeber, 2007a) and The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021) take the lead in developing this approach, but also reflections on kingship and sovereignty (Graeber et al., 2017), as well as the theory of value (Graeber, 2001), provide vivid examples of its effects. In each of these texts, the aim is to give space to constituent imagination and to use an elsewhere to provide alternative ways of imagining the present. Although the specific terms are entirely Graeberian, he is anything but the first anthropologist to use this technique; instead, this approach has been central to the project of anthropology as cultural critique that emerged with Boas (Marcus and Fischer, 1986), continued in the work of early functionalists and structural-functionalists (Foks, 2023), and perhaps reached its peak, before Graeber, in the popular writings of Margaret Mead. For her, the process was almost the same. Mead (1928) starts from an apparently universal and immutable reality—the relationship between adolescence, distress, and rebellion—and through ethnographic work presents an alternative, thus opening a space of different imagination. This is a typical mode of anthropology as the “art of possibility,” as described by Guyer (2009).

The second form of estrangement in Graeber's work, and perhaps what made him more known outside anthropology, follows a different direction and de-familiarizes the mundane by taking everyday elements and making them profoundly meaningful, and yet at the same time contextual and ephemeral. Here, we find some of Graeber's most visionary and popular pages, often initially entrusted to magazines and newspapers and only after developed into fully fledged academic arguments. Here is where we find writings on flying machines and the decline of profit (Graeber, 2023), on crime movies and private property (Graeber, 2007b), on Batman and superheroes (Graeber, 2012c), on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Graeber, 2007b), on police officers’ hatred for puppets (Graeber, 2014b), as well as on the proliferation of bullshit jobs (Graeber, 2018). In these cases, estrangement is achieved through another type of gaze, an almost anti-identificative form of imagination that allows readers to stop empathizing with their own lives and taking them for granted but to observe them, as Voltaire said, “as if seen through the eyes of a stranger or a savage” (Ginzburg, 2012: 96). Through this operation, Graeber shows us the total arbitrariness of what we consider necessary and without alternatives. Here, too, he is in the company of illustrious anthropologists, foremost among them Horace Miner (1956), who, in Body Ritual among the Nacirema, invited his readers to reconsider the absurdities of what they consider normal.

Yet in Graeber, there is also a third form of estrangement, which perhaps more directly refers to Voltaire's polemical tone: an iconoclastic estrangement that aims at making the sacred mundane. In carrying out this project, Graeber turns to the sacred cows of contemporary capitalism: money (Graeber, 1996), debt (Graeber, 2012b), the gospel of work (Graeber, 2018), consumption (Graeber, 2011b), and volunteer wage work (Graeber, 2019). One by one, he tackles them, reconstructs alternative genealogies, shows their historical conjunctions, and, in doing so, reveals how, contrary to neoliberal thought, these categories are not only not necessary but also not ideal. These, in my opinion, are the most illuminated pages of his work, where erudition and political significance converge, as they did in the pages of Marcel Mauss (2000). Like Mauss, in fact, Graeber does not stop at this estrangement but rather, once each of these sacred categories is decomposed, begins to recompose them in an alternative configuration. In this last form, estrangement is primarily an epistemic project, and the challenge becomes getting rid of basic terms for political economy and creating a redefinition or, better still, a re-imagination of the present. This project was, unfortunately, halted by his premature departure, leaving us only with scattered indications (Graeber, 2014a). One such instance is found in the early outlines of a new labor theory of value grounded in care that he started to develop in a series of essays published in The Baffler, in it, he reconceptualized “factory labour [as] a second-order form, and education, or nursing, is part of a much broader process of mutual aid and care that supports and ultimately creates the work by which we create each other” (Grubačić and Vodovnik, 2021: 10).

In this third use of estrangement, Graeber comes closest to Gramsci and the project of creating a new common sense that places political significance and the creation of a hegemonic project above its analytical accuracy—an aspect often forgotten by those who criticize Graeber for the reductionism in some of his pages. “The question for me,” Graeber (2012a: 123) wrote,

is whether our theoretical work is ultimately directed at undoing or dismantling some of the effects of these lopsided structures of imagination, or whether—as can so easily happen when even our best ideas come to be backed up by bureaucratically administered violence—we end up reinforcing them.

This is where we discover how anthropology, for Graeber, can contribute to this dismantling.

A poet of anthropology

Graeber (2007b: 1) opens his collection of essays, Possibilities with an explanation of why he became an anthropologist. “I was drawn to the discipline,” he writes,

because it opens windows on other possible forms of human social existence; because it served as a constant reminder that most of what we assume to be immutable has been, in other times and places, arranged quite differently, and therefore, that human possibilities are in almost every way greater than we ordinarily imagine. Anthropology also affords us new possible perspectives on familiar problems: ways of thinking about the rise of capitalism from the perspective of West Africa, European manners from the perspective of Amazonia, or, for that matter, West African or Amazonian masquerades from the perspective of Chinese festivals or Medieval European carnival.

Over the course of this article, I followed two threads evident in this statement: one about imagination and the other about estrangement and de-familiarization. This journey started with Graeber and traveled across time, space, and intellectual traditions, in an attempt to reconstruct “the leitmotif and the rhythm of developing thought” in his work.

As a way of conclusion, therefore, it seems only appropriate to return to Graeber and anthropology and briefly outline three ways in which, in Graeber's work, the discipline contributed to the recovery of human possibilities.

Firstly, anthropology, through the first process of estrangement that I have analyzed, becomes a repository of potential alternatives. This is Graeber's orientation toward the classical ethnographic canon. He sees it as a potentially infinite source of ideas and provocations. This is precisely the relationship that connects his doctoral research in Madagascar to his analysis of Occupy (Graeber, 2009), the desire

to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts. (Graeber, 2004: 12)

The second contribution of anthropology is hinted at, in parentheses, in this last quote: to show that these alternatives are not only possible but already in existence. Influenced by Mauss and Kropotkin, David argued that we already live in a communist society and that capitalism is, at best, a misguided way of organizing communism. To become aware of it, Graeber (2011a: 38) proposes,

allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a common project, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.

Finally, the third contribution is more transcendental, almost metaphysical, and properly revolutionary. Here, anthropological knowledge is aimed not only at providing alternatives and recovering those already existing but also at destroying the anti-poetic mechanism of neoliberal thought, shattering “the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form” (Graeber, 2011a: 38). This, for Graeber (2011a: 61), is what revolutionaries do, “break existing frames to create new horizons of possibility, an act that then allows a radical restructuring of the social imagination”.