> More evidence for David Graeber
What little I know of the disputes around Graeber suggest this is not going to end his isolation in the wider community of archeologists, economists, sociologists.
What little I know of the disputes around Graeber suggest this is not going to end his isolation in the wider community of archeologists, economists, sociologists.
My take on the different fields:
- anthropology: a central figure. Like all central figures, he can be polarizing
- archeology: a big collaborator but has never pretended to be an archeologist
- economics: celebrated by behavioral economists, rejected by neoclassical ones
- sociology: pretty widely celebrated and cited
being dead doesn't alter how people feel about the work of an academic. If you reject their premises, the extent to which new work validates them or not is often moot. Fred Hoyle was isolated in his lifetime and taken "not seriously" as an astronomer by many because he did a lot of science popularisation and because he held outsider-views on things close to panspermia. Subsequent work which suggests his view that a lot of earths water could come from cometary sources hasn't really significantly altered how people feel about him, because it's grounded in him being irascible, hard and complicated. I would suspect the same is true of Graeber. BTW these people are often adored (rightly so!) by their students because they take time to treat them well, talk to them as people, validate them. It's not that they're inherently bad teachers, bad sources it's that they become isolated inside their fields because they take polemical positions, or are off the main path.