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Possibilities

Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire

By David Graeber

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 Aethetics 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 Prosect 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 Cosmolgical Role of the Police in American Culture