May 2005
Yale University
Department of Anthropology
P.O. Box 208277
New Haven, Connecticut 06520−8277
cc. Professor Richard Charles Levin
President, Yale University?
PO Box 208229 New Haven, CT 06520−8229
An Open Letter to Anthropology Faculty at Yale
Dear Colleagues,
We, your undersigned colleagues at the University of Chicago, are writing to express our deep concern at the recent decision not to renew David Graeber’s position as a member of your department.
Dr. Graeber’s contributions to anthropology have earned him a formidable reputation as a scholar, teacher, and public intellectual. He publishes at a prodigious rate; his work is widely cited; and several of his books and papers are widely used as teaching texts in classrooms in the United States and abroad. His original and provocative combinations of ethnography and critical social theory make him a major new voice in cultural anthropology, and he is fast becoming one of our discipline’s more widely read and well-recognized representatives in the world of public debate.
Given these accomplishments, it is hard to see why any department would not be pleased to have Dr. Graeber as one of its faculty. The decision against him has therefore given rise to much public comment, and it has also led to widespread speculation on the motives that lie behind it. None of this can do anything but a disservice to anthropology at Yale and to the discipline at large.
Respectfully, we urge you to reconsider and to renew Dr. Graeber’s contract.
Yours sincerely,
Ralph Austen
Professor of African History
Jeff Bennet
Collegiate Assistant Professor of Social Sciences
Jennifer Cole
Associate Professor in the Committee on Human Development
Jean Comaroff
Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology
Director, Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory
John Comaroff
Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology
William Mazzarella
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Danilyn Rutherford
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Marshall Sahlins
Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology
Hylton White
Collegiate Assistant Professor of Social Sciences