Winner of the Bateson Book Prize awarded by the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Literature The special tenth anniversary edition contains a new introduction by Thomas Picketty. It shows how debt has defined our human past, and what that means for our economic future. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.ĭebt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history-as well as how it has defined human history.

He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods-that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. It publishes a journal Anthropologica and has reclaimed the name of its former journal, Culture for its occasional online bulletin.Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems-to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. In 1988 the society changed its name to the Canadian Anthropology Society to clarify its identity and emphasize its role as an anthropology association. Its aims were to encourage formal and informal dissemination of knowledge through an annual conference and publications promote relations with other academic and professional associations, aboriginal groups, and governments and publicize ethnological research and activities to further understanding of ethnological practices. The original constitution defined the organization's mandate as providing a forum for the exchange of ideas among ethnologists. In February 1974 a group of 120 anthropologists launched the Canadian Ethnology Society/société canadienne d'ethnologie (CESCE), because they felt there was room for an association of anthropologists separate from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (CSAA) which was dominated by sociologists.

Graeber 5000 years of debt