If you don’t read Neuroanthropology, you’re missing out, both on Daniel Lende’s excellent regular coverage of anthropology news seen through a political lens (or is that politics through an anthropological lens) and on Greg Downey’s occasional massive, entertaining, and informative brain dump. Like many of the rest of us, Greg appears to have been keeping an eye on the Occupy movement protests. Unlike anyone else I’ve seen, he dove into the anarchist philosophy that is informing and shaping these protests.

Last week, Greg posted a profile titled, “David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst*.” In order to do so, of course, he was required to post a definition of anarchism:

(Before anyone ill informed gets all wound up, thinking that by ‘anarchism’ I mean the celebration of rock throwing or balaclava-wearing or punk rock, please take the time to acquaint yourself with the political movement, if you don’t know what anarchism actually is.  Go ahead.  Look it up on Wikipedia if you want. Go ahead.  We’ll wait.  Or check out Graeber’s pamphlet, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology; it’s a free download which is simultaneously kind of anarchist and just plain generous at the same time.)

Graeber is somewhat controversial as an academic figure, given his political involvement, but Greg makes what I think is a good case that perhaps economics shouldn’t be the only field where political application of knowledge is acceptable.

Graeber is doing exactly what many of us want university-based social and cultural anthropologists to do more of: not just doing outstanding, useful applied work (which is bloody brilliant, of course), but also showing how our distinctive intellectual perspectives – comparative, evolutionary, cross-cultural, critical, even deconstructive (and ‘post-modern’) – provide academic analyses with important, ‘real world’ implications. After all, part of the current problem in the global economy is not just that we have bad applications of economic theory—we have blinkered economic theory in ascendance, including a profound limit on our understanding of debt, as Graeber points out.

More importantly, Graeber underlines that Reaganite-Thatcherist triumphalism — ‘There Is No Alternative!’ (to our own peculiar form of capitalism) — is a lie that denies human creativity, and freedom.  The creative inspiration of anthropology, the potential for cross-cultural, historical and evolutionary research to show us constantly that other ways of being human are possible, is central in my own teaching and research, so I especially appreciate that Graeber is so strong and clear on this point in public.

The body of Greg’s post covers some of the things that anthropology and a cross-cultural perspective–and Graeber’s scholarship in particular–can tell us about our current situation. He discusses self-organization in the face of a leadership vacuum, the history of money and how current economic thinking on the topic relies on a fairy tale, and the unprecedented role of debt in our modern Western society.

His post would be worthwhile for the information on the fetishization of debt alone, but there’s a lot more food for thought there. I recommend reading the whole thing. Besides, then you’ll get to find out what the asterisk in the title means.