American anthropologist whose work traced credit and obligation through economies that ran without markets or coinage.
Contribution
In Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Graeber argued that credit systems came before coinage and that the familiar story of money arising from barter has no support in the anthropological record. Relations of obligation, recorded and enforced in many forms, organized economic life long before markets did.
He taught at Yale University and at Goldsmiths, University of London, and from 2013 was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He took part in the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. He died in Venice in September 2020.
On this wiki
The Jeff Emmett page connects mycelial approaches to resource distribution with Graeber’s work on non-market economies. His account of money as a record of obligation bears on Money Theories as Coordination Stories.
Selected works
- Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2001).
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011).
- The Utopia of Rules (2015).
- Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018).
- The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021, with David Wengrow).
Related pages
Provenance
Stub entry created 27 September 2026 in the Quartz Sanitation run, to give a page to links from the Jeff Emmett page that pointed at no page. Written from his published books and general reference knowledge. First-pass entry: sections require enrichment from the underlying project documents.