David Graeber

David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; born 12 February 1961) is an American-born, London-based anthropologist and anarchist activist, perhaps best known for his 2011 volume Debt: The First 5000 Years. He is Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. As an assistant professor and associate professor of anthropology at Yale from 1998–2007, he specialised in theories of value and social theory. The university's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy, and a petition with more than 4,500 signatures. He went on to become, from 2007–13, Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His activism includes protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, "We are the 99 percent". 2Early life Graeber's parents, who were in their forties when Graeber was born, were self-taught working-class intellectuals in New York. Graeber's mother, Ruth Rubinstein, had been a garment worker, and played the lead role in the 1930s musical comedy revue Pins & Needles, staged by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Graeber's father Kenneth, who was affiliated with the Youth Communist League in college, though he quit well before the Hitler-Stalin pact, participated in the Spanish Revolution in Barcelona and fought in the Spanish Civil Wa