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Греберианство: краткое социологическое изложение
For the professional (in social sciences or humanities) reader David Graeber is a somewhat controversial figure. On the one hand, he is a remarkably successful foreign author in Russia: all his major books have been published in Russian, although his texts and reactions to them have been rather modestly represented in scientific journals. On the other hand (which seems to explain this modest reception), Graeber’s “disciplinary affiliation” remains somewhat ambiguous, while being quite significant for the current, rigidly “classificatory” model of scientific discourse: is he a theoretical anthropologist or an empirical ethnographer, a historian or a philosopher-political economist, a public intellectual or a political activist, an ideologue or a practitioner of anarchism? In prefaces to his books and numerous articles, Graeber attributes his ambiguous “status” to his political activism which typically led to his being referred to in two capacities: on the one hand, as a renowned anthropologist (“a leader of anthropology”) and social theorist; on the other, as a public intellectual (and “anarchist”). In both cases, it is difficult to say to what extent his ethnographic research and conceptual provisions could (or should) be of interest to sociologists (leaving aside the well-known interdisciplinarity of sociology, which implies constant partial engagement with all social and humanities disciplines, and today even natural sciences). Let us try to answer the question of why sociologists need Graeber’s works by identifying their possible contribution to the development of sociological imagination and sociological optics. While anticipating inevitable critical reproaches for incomplete and inaccurate reconstruction of Graeber’s social-philosophical-anthropological and ethnographic-methodological positions, the article presents an overview of his key ideas from the pragmatic position of significance and usefulness for the sociological reader. The author identifies in this conditional ‘Graeber studies’ the following no less conditional – due to their substantive and methodological interrelations – thematic sections, following the traditional “functional” structuring of sociology: theory (what we study – search for universal foundations of social order), methodology (how we study – principles for investigating these foundations), and – albeit rather implicitly – empirical evidence (as a basis of theoretical constructs and public comments), also incorporating the enlightening and practical-transformative functions of sociology as evident in Graeber’s anti-Western and anti-capitalist passages