Their goal: to explore the nature of social power and the forms that resistance to it have taken—or might take in the future.

In this collection, David Graeber revisits questions raised in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. These twelve essays cover: the origins of capitalism, the history of European table manners, love potions and gender in rural Madagascar, the phenomenology of giant puppets at street protests, and much more. Their goal: to explore the nature of social power and the forms that resistance to it have taken—or might take in the future.

Introduction

PART I: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ORIGINS
OF OUR CURRENT PREDICAMENT

1. Manners, Deference, and Private Property: Or, Elements for a General
Theory of Hierarchy

2. The Very Idea of Consumption: Desire, Phantasms, and the Aesthetics of
Destruction from Medieval Times to the Present

3. Turning Modes of Production Inside-Out: Or, Why Capitalism Is a
Transformation of Slavery (short version)

4. Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of
Construction

PART II: PROVISIONAL AUTONOMOUS ZONE:
DILEMMAS OF AUTHORITY IN RURAL MADAGASCAR

5. Provisional Autonomous Zone: Or, The Ghost-State in Madagascar

6. Dancing with Corpses Reconsidered: An Interpretation of Famadihana (in
Arivonimamo, Madagascar)

7. Love Magic and Political Morality in Central Madagascar, 1875–1990

8. Oppression

PART III: DIRECT ACTION, DIRECT DEMOCRACY, AND SOCIAL THEORY

9. The Twilight of Vanguardism

10. Social Theory as Science and Utopia: Or, Does the Prospect of a General
Sociological Theory Still Mean Anything in an Age of Globalization?

11. There Never Was a West: Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces in
Between

12. On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars
of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture

Index