Almost Everything Can Be Found For Free
1 star
Super easy to read this book when you've read all but one essay in it multiple times already. (Or, in some cases, have come back to the essay multiple times, skimming it for the piece of information you remember existing within its text.)
This book frustrates me, much like many of the David Graeber projects that have come out since his death. There's a hollowness to it that feels like someone trying to build a person up into some kind of Anarchist God (or Anthropologist God), and it's exhausting. Certainly, there must be more people out there than this one man who often and frequently neglected whole swathes of criticism that would've fueled his analyses. I'm sure there must be more people out there than the one guy who—though his work was engaging, sometimes insightful, and interesting—frequently extrapolated his more modern examples to beyond useless because he rarely looked at …
Super easy to read this book when you've read all but one essay in it multiple times already. (Or, in some cases, have come back to the essay multiple times, skimming it for the piece of information you remember existing within its text.)
This book frustrates me, much like many of the David Graeber projects that have come out since his death. There's a hollowness to it that feels like someone trying to build a person up into some kind of Anarchist God (or Anthropologist God), and it's exhausting. Certainly, there must be more people out there than this one man who often and frequently neglected whole swathes of criticism that would've fueled his analyses. I'm sure there must be more people out there than the one guy who—though his work was engaging, sometimes insightful, and interesting—frequently extrapolated his more modern examples to beyond useless because he rarely looked at the context in which those examples fit (a superb irony for an anthropologist who had careful consideration for the nuance of the past).
At best, his work regarding patriarchy was surface level, and I don't care how many people try to convince me otherwise while highlighting the works in which he showcases those very surface level critiques. "The Bully's Pulpit," which is present in this book, is a perfect example of not understanding how the targeting of Bosniak boys and men over the age of 15 is part of a patriarchal problem, nor does it really explore why it was that Bosnian Serbs could successfully target them and pretend they weren't engaging in genocide, but it is also a perfect example of how that that very idea he had around boys and men can be extrapolated and misattributed by the "male loneliness epidemic" manarchists.
There is one "new" essay, which I have not found anywhere online. It's "The Revolt of the Caring Classes." Perhaps someone should lift it and post it to TAL, ensuring that the collection is complete. Perhaps it's good as a free ebook that collates a lot of his most commonly referenced essays, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend someone pay for this (saw a hardback in my local bookstore for €32, which is a bit pricy for things that've been widely distributed multiple times). Other essays included were turned into longer works (such as "There Never Was a West," which fueled much of what became The Dawn of Everything and "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which became Bullshit Jobs).
It's baffling that this is the choice that would be made, either by the editors or the publisher. Certainly, it would've been more interesting to engage in his unpublished works over these often referenced pieces.