I really wonder that any of the above is based on substantial anthropological/archeological evidence or understanding therof...I just finished reading David Graeber's works on debt and bs jobs and history and it makes me extremely suspicious of this article's statements...
Thanks, but 'any of the above' is of course very generic, so what exactly are the points of contention ? Sebastien's experience is working with french public services around commons policies, and I don't think there are people in France with more experience; A fuller overview of experiments is available in the report Mutualizing Urban Provisioning Systems which reviews the various public policies, though mostly in European cities and regions; the wiki has 25,000 documentary items including lots of peer reviewed scientific articles. This is the generic methodological bibliography, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Sources_of_P2P_Theory and this is post-Ostrom literature on the field of commons history and practice, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/What_You_Should_Read_To_Understand_the_Commons;
Of course, David Graeber's work itself is highly debatable and contentious itself. Here is a survey of some critiques, including by anthropologists, who are generally surprised he ignored their work since the 70s: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Dawn_of_Everything
Thank you for the links, I really appreciate that you took the time to respond.
I'm an absolute layman when it comes to anthropology/P2P/social sciences however I have great interest in ways to improve the human condition so I'll study your work.
My remark about being extremely critical and suspicious applies evenly to everyone in the field. Reading your article and interview I had a hunch that - having been saturated with Graeber's ideas/views - your understanding of the role of state/markets are quite different from his anarchist ideals and if so, I wonder how to reconcile the two.
Scepticism is always a healthy attitude, thanks for reacting. I appreciated Graeber's work up to his last work; and spent a week with him perhaps 18 months before his death. He was a great person. But his last book is too voluntarist, oblivious of constraining societal structures, in my view, and that creates the kind of attitudes we had during Occupy, which ended being a great disaster. I'm also a big fan of Scott, and live in Zoomia. Very broadly, I see the world as dominated by kinship (gift economy, commoning), then by markets-states, and about to switch again towards thoroughly distributed infrastructures, following the same kind of cosmo-local logic that were operative in the High Middle Ages. Graeber does not only ignore the vast work about immediate-return hunter-gatherers from anthropology since the 70s, but also the very associationist free cities of the Middle Ages.
That's great, thank you. Can you please recommend me a few of the most significant schools/figures Graeber ignored?
Since I lack formal anthropology education I rely on what I can read and on personal experience of living with tribes in central Borneo and my three decades of traveling the globe (also lived under stages/forms of socialist and capitalists systems).
My impression is that while kinship and states/markets are powerful dominating factors indeed I've always been amazed how abruptly they can change when new ideas are introduced (saw volunteerizm working in my life)...and as far as I understand that's one of the main points of The Dawn book
I really wonder that any of the above is based on substantial anthropological/archeological evidence or understanding therof...I just finished reading David Graeber's works on debt and bs jobs and history and it makes me extremely suspicious of this article's statements...
Thanks, but 'any of the above' is of course very generic, so what exactly are the points of contention ? Sebastien's experience is working with french public services around commons policies, and I don't think there are people in France with more experience; A fuller overview of experiments is available in the report Mutualizing Urban Provisioning Systems which reviews the various public policies, though mostly in European cities and regions; the wiki has 25,000 documentary items including lots of peer reviewed scientific articles. This is the generic methodological bibliography, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Sources_of_P2P_Theory and this is post-Ostrom literature on the field of commons history and practice, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/What_You_Should_Read_To_Understand_the_Commons;
Of course, David Graeber's work itself is highly debatable and contentious itself. Here is a survey of some critiques, including by anthropologists, who are generally surprised he ignored their work since the 70s: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Dawn_of_Everything
Thank you for the links, I really appreciate that you took the time to respond.
I'm an absolute layman when it comes to anthropology/P2P/social sciences however I have great interest in ways to improve the human condition so I'll study your work.
My remark about being extremely critical and suspicious applies evenly to everyone in the field. Reading your article and interview I had a hunch that - having been saturated with Graeber's ideas/views - your understanding of the role of state/markets are quite different from his anarchist ideals and if so, I wonder how to reconcile the two.
Scepticism is always a healthy attitude, thanks for reacting. I appreciated Graeber's work up to his last work; and spent a week with him perhaps 18 months before his death. He was a great person. But his last book is too voluntarist, oblivious of constraining societal structures, in my view, and that creates the kind of attitudes we had during Occupy, which ended being a great disaster. I'm also a big fan of Scott, and live in Zoomia. Very broadly, I see the world as dominated by kinship (gift economy, commoning), then by markets-states, and about to switch again towards thoroughly distributed infrastructures, following the same kind of cosmo-local logic that were operative in the High Middle Ages. Graeber does not only ignore the vast work about immediate-return hunter-gatherers from anthropology since the 70s, but also the very associationist free cities of the Middle Ages.
That's great, thank you. Can you please recommend me a few of the most significant schools/figures Graeber ignored?
Since I lack formal anthropology education I rely on what I can read and on personal experience of living with tribes in central Borneo and my three decades of traveling the globe (also lived under stages/forms of socialist and capitalists systems).
My impression is that while kinship and states/markets are powerful dominating factors indeed I've always been amazed how abruptly they can change when new ideas are introduced (saw volunteerizm working in my life)...and as far as I understand that's one of the main points of The Dawn book
I think the best summary is from Daniel Bitton, he's listed amongst the critics I've excerpted here, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Dawn_of_Everything
His own original site has an in-depth treatment.