Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Abeeb, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures

and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Few people embody the intersections of this show's interests quite as much as anthropologists, activists, and prolific writer David Graber.

His fieldwork, his writing,

and his activism represent the best, I think, of what this show does, which is turn an eye to spiritual and cosmological concerns, while taking direct and creative political action

seriously and blending those together.

David is really interested not just in ideas or reducing things to theories, but actually

what kinds of values, the things that we do in our lives and the aspects of culture have

for us, what the meaning there is.

And I love that about his work. He is the author of like an overwhelming

number of books, including debt the first 5,000 years, on Kings, which he wrote with Marshall

Salins, and most recently bullshit jobs of theory. The book that got me into David's work years ago

is called Fragments of an

anarchist anthropology. It's a very slim volume, but it had such an impact on me that it really

reframed my view on anthropology and why I now believe that anthropology is completely vital

for the world we live in now. And part of the reason why is

because it blended, like I said, those spiritual concerns with political ones. And I think David gets

asked a lot to talk about class analysis, which he does really well and analysis or economic

history and that sort of thing.

And he's great at it.

But on this episode, I wanted to focus on some of the other aspects of his work.

So we talk about whether or not we need spirits and spirituality for leftist politics. We talk about the occult and mythology.

...