Today's thinker is the deepest I've gone into actual academic theory, but he's quite interesting despite the heady words, and is usually quite understandable. So a good introduction to that dry, dead yet fascinating world which I occasionally dive into.
David Graeber is an anthropologist and an anarchist (David Graeber, the Anarchist Anthropologist has a bit of a children's book feel to it, rather like Amelia Bedelia). For him, the two disciplines inform each other, because anthropology shows us that our current arrangement of society is not something inevitable, but only the product of historical accident. At the same time, it makes any authority seem arbitrary rather than internally justified, which calls us to question it and imagine a world without it.
Anyway, intelligent, friendly, and readable. For an introduction, listen to this interview with Charlie Rose (sorry, his questions are terrible, but the answers are good) and this interview at the online radio program The Authority Smashing hour. That was just a link to its main page, then scroll down and listen to his interview. (There's also an interview with Derrick Jensen on that page.) After that introduction, go to his Wikipedia page, scroll to the bottom, and read the articles of his there; this one might be the most fun.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment