Analytical summary of 93 pages of email correspondence between David Graeber, Ilana Gershon, Sarah Green, one postdoc and one graduate student, in addition to messages from Marshall Sahlins, Marilyn Strathern, Sean Dowdy and members of the anthropology departments of SOAS and Stanford, from November 11 to December 25, 2017, regarding Giovanni da Col and HAU.
Page references “(p.1)”, “(p. 93)” are to the PDF of the compiled email threads provided by an unnamed donor. To consult this PDF (“GRAEBER COUP EMAILS 93 pages”) click on this Google Drive link. The comments left by “narrator” on the PDF are from the donor. #haumemo.
Disclaimer: This document does not represent the views of the Society for Ethnographic Theory or its other editors.
May 2020
1. The Three Gs (Graeber, Gershon and Green)
Imagine one of the most famous scholars in the world directly contacts a small group of precarious and unemployed junior scholars and offers them the editorship and “collective” ownership of a successful academic journal in exchange for taking part in an elaborate conspiracy involving the symbolic and reputational assassination of the editor.
In June 2018, a public scandal erupted on social media through the hashtag “#hautalk” concerning the journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory and its editor-in-chief, Giovanni da Col. But the origin of this scandal went back eight months, when an extraordinary plot was hatched by a handful of notable anthropologists and their followers to carefully orchestrate it.
David Graeber, an LSE professor and former editor-at-large of HAU (2012–2017), inaugurated this plot in November 2017 in a group email with the subject heading “Coup d’état” (p. 1), which led to a lengthy correspondence among the participants, which comprise the 93-page PDF document attached. A former participant of this “coup” sent me a copy of the correspondence after listening to Justin Murphy’s interview with me, “HAU did this happen? With Digital Editor Enrique Martino”. The present memorandum is a summary analysis of and excerpts from these “Graeber coup emails”.
If you are unfamiliar with the history of HAU and #hautalk, 2011–2018, I recommend first reading the section “brief account” on pages 7 to 11.
According to Graeber, it was crucial to find a way to force the “removal of Gio, by whatever means necessary” (p. 58). The core of active participants included Sarah Green, a professor at the University of Helsinki, former chair of HAU’s External Advisory Board (2013–2017) and current president of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA); Ilana Gershon, a professor at Indiana University and former HAU associate editor (2016–2017); Sean Dowdy, a psychotherapist and assistant professor at the University of Chicago and former HAU managing editor (2014–2016), and three junior former members of HAU’s editorial team who were actively recruited and instructed by the tenured faculty. I have kept the latter anonymous (“x”, “xx”, “xxx”), according to the wishes of the unnamed donor.
The emails surrounding the self-described coup against HAU and its editor reveal the genesis of the rumours that would eventually form the basis for the three main allegations against Giovanni da Col: physical assault of HAU staff; sexual harassment of female staff; and the embezzlement of HAU funds.
These allegations — all of them subsequently found to be without any substance — were enumerated or insinuated in the statements made public in June 2018: David Graeber’s June 11 “HAU Apology”; two anonymous open letters, “Former HAU Staff 7” and “haustaffletter.wordpress” published June 13 and 14, respectively; the June 18 petition (“Public Statement on Hau”) by Ilana Gershon, David Graeber, Sarah Green and Keir Martin; and Colleen Flaherty’s article “A Journal Implodes”, published in Inside Higher Education. The accusations were taken at face value, reproduced and circulated in some of the discipline’s most influential institutions and outlets, including an editorial note by Deborah Thomas for the American Anthropologist , entitled “Leadership and Accountability”.
The email threads show a coordinated and increasingly desperate effort by the group to remove Giovanni da Col from the position of editor-in-chief of HAU, starting with Graeber’s expression of an “intense desire to kill him” (p. 1), a personal wish that soon morphed into a moral assertion, “this person should be killed” (p. 4).
In a blog comment, Graeber claimed that “around November 20” 2017 he was “contacted by former HAU workers” about “allegations of bullying” by Giovanni da Col. The veracity of this is questionable, however, since Graeber actively contacted “xx” in early November via a twitter direct message and offered to “help” him by sharing “the story” of da Col’s “bullying/gaslighting” and then proceeded to put a tremendous effort into the “plan to gather a group of people to do something about it” (p.10).
Graeber rhetorically asked this small fraction of previous HAU collaborators he managed to recruit for the “coup”: “Am I really powerful? Well I guess we’re about to find out!” (p. 13). “I’m about to unleash the hounds of hell”, “I feel like I’m in a comic book” (pp. 71, 45).
Graeber led this group to believe that he himself had “started” HAU and that Giovanni da Col was merely an expedient “operator” (pp. 11, 9). Graeber may have convinced himself that he was the main “founder” of the “intellectual project” of HAU (p. 81), by lending his name and fame to HAU’s founding manifesto of December 2011, largely written by Giovanni da Col, and then believing he had a right, above any existing legal structure or governing process, to taketh away what he had bequeathed.
Graeber’s “HAU Apology” can be traced through this new email evidence as the public culmination of carefully manipulated mischaracterizations. For example, the notion that Graeber’s “name and status appear to have been used [by da Col] to intimidate and threaten” staff is rooted in a message by “xx” (male) who tells Graeber that “I really only engaged with HAU because your name was attached to it”, since “your name, does carry weight with many of us junior radical anthros” (p. 21). Graeber then ends up saying in another email (note the gender swap) “one of them told me she’d said to herself ‘if David Graeber was involved, how bad could it be?’” (p. 84). He also condensed and transformed characters in the saga, for instance, when he drew on “a story that reached me — admittedly third hand” about a “Norwegian woman” who was a prospective HAU “author” but who was later portrayed as “staff” (pp. 1, 9).
An incident in 2014 when da Col had a tussle with an acquaintance over the use of an apartment — a personal issue entirely unrelated to HAU — was transformed through the elixir of the coup plot into an accusation that da Col physically attacked a HAU staff member in its office — an office that never existed outside cyberspace.
At other times, Graeber simply invented incidents about da Col from scratch, claiming that “he’s been abusing a lot of people, were incidents of violence again”, that he heard of “new reports of violence”, and that da Col was getting “away with physically attacking people” (pp. 1, 10).
Graeber widely circulated a list of what he considered serious allegations in late 2017 which included the accusation that da Col offered to pay Dowdy “in the form of sexual services (not performed by himself)”. Graeber imagines that da Col was “terrorising young female academics into providing sexual services for underlings in lieu of payment” and then suggested in private that da Col could have also been using his “sister” for this, to which Sahlins added: “I don’t think he has a sister. Must be his mother’” (p. 4).
This obscene exchange is considerably viler than what Graeber cites as da Col’s “weird sexist shit”, such as the apparent joke when offering a “woman for the room” in the “jocular terms” of exaggerated hospitality to a guest speaker at a HAU event (pp. 9, 14).
In Graeber’s first programmatic 1500-word email to the self-proclaimed coup group, in whose eyes Graeber was a renowned public figure who represented their intellectual and political ideals, he pronounced his injunction “to kill the bastard” (p. 9).
The motive of at least two active participants, who produced various open letters and lists of allegations at Graeber’s request, were likely marked by his strident language and his implicit offer of a new personal relationship with him if they complied with his plot.
These two participants assured Graeber and Gershon that they were keen to publicly drag da Col’s “name” through the “mud” (p. 30). They offered to state in writing (although anonymously) that da Col’s “behavior was totally abusive and violent — no matter the geographic distance” (p. 20), with the effect that “Gio is going to be in a pretty awful position. ‘Good’ awful, of course, from our point of view” (p. 47).
Confident of their cronyistic ability to bypass a transparent call by HAU’s directors for new editors to apply, Graeber and Gershon offered members of the group the editorship in exchange for their participation, telling them “you could run it”, “you with [x] if she’s as cool as she seems”, “in place ready to replace Gio as editor/director of HAU if we oust him”, “we’d have to hire 2–3 people to do what Gio’s now doing” (pp. 1, 3, 14).
For “initiating our attack” (pp. 50, 73) against da Col, Graeber also suggested that he knew “ace hackers” who could access HAU’s bank accounts, and that he had a “spy friend” who could honey-trap Giovanni da Col in order to generate a sexual harassment scandal: “She’d have just worn a wire, allowed him to try to pick her up, and got enough out of him in half an hour to probably have him jailed” (p. 18).
The correspondence also includes messages from Marshall Sahlins (University of Chicago) and Marilyn Strathern (University of Cambridge), possibly the two most famous living anthropologists, as well as various members of the anthropology departments of SOAS and Stanford.
The senior participants of the coup and the driving forces behind it hailed from the top echelons of academic anthropology. The emails discussed below show them engaged in what they accused Giovanni da Col of doing, namely deploying academic power to ruin someone’s life and career. Whether their charges against Giovanni da Col were based in fact did not seem to be decisive.
As Graeber summarized the strategy,
“people will assume he [da Col] was up to shady things and rumours will circulate, even though they might not be entirely accurate rumours” (p. 66).
Gershon was instrumental in drafting the petitions and reaching out to anthropology blogs (pp. 48, 95) in preparation for a public campaign that she predicted would destroy not just da Col but HAU as a whole: “HAU will go under quietly because people [will] stop reviewing for HAU and stop submitting articles, we use our community’s passive aggressive instincts to do Gio/HAU in” — an outcome Gershon described as “VERY satisfying” (p. 65).
2. “Plan A” and “Plan B”; or, the Private and Public Options for a Coup
The group around Graeber, Gershon and Green initially produced two plans (“Plan A” and “Plan B”) to remove Giovanni da Col from office by confronting him or his superiors with a “a list of depredations” (p. 10). In a short space of time, the strategy shifted from offering da Col a “quiet” exit — “if he agrees to step aside then he will able to save face” (p. 57) — to a “coup” via public shaming.
“Plan A” oscillated between a direct letter to da Col or to the members of HAU’s External Advisory Board (EAB) or to the director of the University of Chicago Press asking for da Col’s resignation. This letter would be a “shot across the bows” (p. 28) sent in Strathern’s name, with Graeber and Chris Gregory as co-signatories.
Graeber still considered himself to be the acting editor-at-large of HAU in late 2017, even though his mandate had expired in May of that year. According to HAU’s 2013 Constitution, the role of the editor-at-large included being the contact person for grievances and controversies reported by the editorial team and bringing them to the External Advisory Board (EAB).
The “coup” group, including an associate editor (Gershon) and a member of the Editorial Board (Strathern), did not want to pursue their claims through institutional channels or HAU governing organs, eventually discarding altogether the notion of contacting the EAB (20 members), Editorial Board (106 members), or HAU-NET members (37 supporting institutions).
It is unclear how someone like Marilyn Strathern could have considered these broad oversight groups to be compromised. Strathern dropped off halfway through the “Plan A” plot; as Graeber says, “unfortunately Dame Marilyn has gone wobbly on us” after she noted that the management was being radically restructured and that a “new treasurer” was already in place (p. 59), implying that the coup was no longer necessary.
Other members of the EAB and the Editorial Board were contacted by Graeber individually to add their “big names” as weight, for example: “Sarah Green — well, obviously”; “Holly High — I’m in contact with her now”; “Lauren Leve — ex-girlfriend now trying to convince me to be cautious”; “Michael Scott — colleague, dislikes me, coward, will come along if others are” (p. 46).
Plan A ended up as a letter sent on December 20, 2017, to Giovanni da Col by David Graeber, coordinated with Gershon and Sahlins (pp. 83–86), in which Graeber demanded possession of HAU under threat of public scandal, warning that “proceeding this way will prevent the inevitable explosions about to occur”.
After claiming to have evidence of da Col’s violence and sexual harassment, he said, “at this particular historical juncture some of these scandals will be particularly difficult to brush aside” (p. 85).
Da Col promptly forwarded this email to Carole McGranahan, Chair of the EAB and Professor at University of Colorado-Boulder, and invited the EAB to conduct an investigation into the allegations. The Executive Council, made up of 8 of the 20 members composing the EAB (Carlos Fausto, Jane Guyer, Michael Lambek, Rena Lederman, Carole McGranahan [Interim Chair], Michael Puett, and Andrew Shryock), issued its findings in early 2018 and concluded that Graeber’s allegations were not credible.
When the EAB chair contacted Graeber to request evidence of the broader criminal allegations, Graeber refused to turn over any. Instead, he threatened the chair (as well as other HAU members), who were referred to in the emails as “a dud”, “completely unreliable”, and “Gio’s toadie” — “I warned her [McGranahan] before I left” (pp. 9, 48, 90).
“Plan B” was to publish two open letters, one signed by senior members of the group and the other signed anonymously by three or four editors and graduate students who had previously worked with da Col and were no longer part of HAU. “Plan B” was not put into action until June 2018, half a year after the Executive Council had already hired a treasurer and decided to pay out forfeited honoraria and implemented the plan approved by the EAB in May 2017 to address known management problems. For details on “Plan B” and HAU’s restructuring, see the “brief account” of the labour relations and the creation of HAU and #hautalk section below.
3. Lawyers and Sexual Harassment Fabrications
One of the main allegations circulated by David Graeber was that Giovanni da Col was employing “threats of professional destruction or legal harassment” against staff. Yet the correspondence reveals that the group actively consulted with lawyers (pp. 32, 34, 50) about the potential allegations.
Marshall Sahlins’ lawyer stated that their best chance for pressuring the University of Chicago Press to remove da Col from the editorship lay in a “personal misconduct (sexual harassment)” (p. 24) story. Evidence for this was flimsy; it was simply asserted as “Sexual harassment of female HAU staff” (p. 25) in the list of allegations circulated by Graeber.
This stemmed from a claim made by one of Graeber’s followers, “x”, who had left HAU in 2013 and who was possibly also promised the co-editorship by Graeber (p. 3). Although “x” had never met da Col in person, she said that “his behaviour toward me bordered on sexual harassment at times” (p. 5), referring to a Facebook chat in 2013 where they discussed their exercise routines, hiking and potential “fieldwork” amongst Crossfit fitness groups (p. 5). In the coup email exchanges, Graeber replied that that was “not ‘bordering on’ sexual harassment it pretty much fits to textbook definition far as I’m concerned” (p. 13).
There is no other mention of sexual harassment in the emails. After seeing and circulating the lawyer’s note (p. 24) in mid-November, Graeber attempted to pursue the angle of lodging accusations “at this particular historical juncture” by contacting “xxx”, a female editor, on November 29, 2017 with an email soliciting testimony, expressing that the most desirable finding would be a “super-clear case of sexual harassment. Let’s see what we can do to back you up”. She immediately replies “Ah, I see. I of course am very aware that Giovanni is very tricky to pin down when it comes to illegal dealings” but does not mention anything in this regard, and instead produces this letter and tells Graeber “you’re welcome to give it to the lawyer or pass it around as you see fit”. In sum, the group undertook all possible legal action against da Col, but they failed.
4. The Open Letters: A Multiplication of Personhood
There is strong indication that both the “HAU Staff 7” and the “haustaffletter.wordpress” open letters were not composed, as claimed, by the 7 plus 4 staff members who appear as signatories but were instead primarily compiled by 3 or 4 persons. Other people may have signed to show support and achieve “anonymity”, since “x” said there was “strength in numbers” (p. 39), but they did not add any further allegations.
The formulations suggested by “x” in the emails (pp. 5–7) and her draft document, “Allegations of misconduct against GdC to date (24/11/2017)” (p. 25) do not differ significantly from the first open letter that was published seven months later.
One person [Dowdy], rather than four, seems to have single-handedly produced the second open letter at “haustaffletter.wordpress”, based on a document entitled “HAUStafferReport”, which was posted to twitter by Graeber and likely produced in 2018 by someone who had resigned from HAU in 2016. Green relays to Graeber her knowledge about Dowdy and what she referred to elsewhere as a “disagreement” over honoraria payment, an issue that arose during her “time as chair [of the EAB] that had not been resolved”. However, during Green’s tenure as Chair of the EAB (2013–2017), no EAB meeting was ever called to discuss any staff complaints or address any grievance.
Some members of the group may have co-signed both letters to further inflate numbers. Both letters used the misleading term “HAU staff” for anonymous co-signatories, that could include everyone from a pool of well over a hundred people who were in any way collaborating with HAU at some point in the past, such as Associate Editors, designers and copyeditors who liaised primarily with the managing editor and were offered UK freelance rates, and editorial and social media volunteers (many without any honoraria whatsoever, others with one of around US$1000 a year).
5. The role of Sarah Green and figures at SOAS and Stanford
Towards the beginning of an email thread, Graeber said that he was “already in touch with Sarah Green and she’s good to go” (p. 13). Green surreptitiously provided Graeber and the group with HAU’s internal documents to “make it easier formally to remove him” and to prepare the path for their “coup” (pp. 5, 10, 34). Graeber says repeatedly he doesn’t “know the details of what the formal structures are (I’m terrible, terrible at admin, this is one of my life problems.) Let me check with SG” (p. 10).
Green did not disclose the plot to the EAB, the adjudicating body of HAU, and was thus not only bypassing the EAB but also violating her responsibilities and the trust placed in her when she was appointed the EAB chair.
In 4 years of her work as Chair of the EAB, the record shows that it held only a single “meeting,” conducted over email and via a survey. In a report she submitted to the EAB, dated June 2015, she wrote, “Over the summer, a revised constitution will be prepared, which will include revisions in the structure” of the “collective” project and address the known fact that “the vast majority of the work is done for free”. However, there is no record that she ever convened another meeting to prepare or revise such a document, including her proposal to establish “an explicit code of conduct”.
Formally, her term ended in May 2016, but she pre-emptively extended her own chairship for an additional year, without any election or permission from the rest of the EAB. Green also did not bring to the EAB for adjudication, the January 2016 letter of complaint from several professors at Stanford — but passed it on to the subsequent chair for her to deal with it, and subsequently also to someone who leaked it in February 2019.
In her final report to the EAB in May 2017, Green says she had “envisaged” a “plan to restructure HAU [that] did not proceed as planned”. The reason, she said, was that Gershon, who volunteered to become the interim co-editor of HAU for four months in late 2016 while da Col was on sabbatical, was also “planning to take some role in carrying out that task” of administrative restructuring involving executive control. It seems this internal attempt to “restructure” HAU failed because they both had “misunderstandings with Giovanni”.
Gershon then wrote an email to da Col saying the she considered it “an open secret” that Dowdy was treated “badly” and that she did not want da Col to “be our boss”, “a boss who has generously given us editorial decision-making powers for a certain amount of time.” After sending this final report, Green summoned a meeting of the EAB — sans da Col — to propose another attempt at an internal restructuring. When some members of the EAB asked for the editor-in-chief to be present, she discontinued her participation.
When Green stopped presiding over the EAB in May 2017, she sent a direct letter to Graeber and the other editors of HAU describing da Col as someone with a “problem with anger management, with gender politics, and with an extraordinarily overblown sense of his own importance”. She said that she herself could not raise these issues in a “public” forum. This may have given Graeber the idea that he could use his large public platform to this effect.
Graeber said this was the “period” when he started “working closely with her” (p. 10). What bothered Green about da Col came down to the “implication of him being the boss that is [what is] offensive to me” (p. 60).
There are hints that the widely circulated petition of June 18, 2018, called the “Public Statement on HAU”, was primarily formulated by Green and Gershon back in 2017, judging by the continuous and almost signature use of certain clichés, such as “open secret”, “mechanisms of accountability”, “establishment of democratic and accountable systems”, “join us in finding a framework”, found in both the petition and their emails (pp. 17, 26, 88). Considering that this petition ended up collecting 616 signatories, they represented a large pool of potential new coup members who could have been called on to vote in the authors of the petition as new directors under the guise of democratic participation.
Green is currently president of EASA, which announced in its August 2019 newsletter that it would undertake a “moral” inquiry into the “HAU affair 2011–2017”. An addendum from November 2019 by EASA’s former president stated unequivocally that the decision to open up this “enquiry / inquiry / review (all three terms were used in the letter)” was decided by the new executive, Sarah Green.
It seems evident that Green is now using EASA executive power and cloaking it in technocratic sloganeering to pursue her own particular obsession: four internal and external attempts to permanently remove Giovanni da Col; in August 2016 in league with Gershon; in May 2017 through the EAB; in November 2017 as part of David Graeber’s “coup” (“bounce him”, “like we tried last time” p. 1); and in June 2018 with the petition that under the threat of mass resignation sought to open The Society for Ethnographic Theory to individual membership recruited through the petition.
Once all these plans failed, and once they realized they could not occupy HAU’s leadership, the only option the Three Gs looked forward to was the destroying of HAU altogether.
The emails reveal that various members of the anthropology departments of SOAS (p. 33) and Stanford (pp. 14, 47) had prior knowledge of the coup plot. Some even asked Graeber for the list of allegations against da Col in order to forward it to other people.
This laid the foundation for the Gershon cliché later promoted on social media and EASA-linked blogs that “abuse” at HAU was an “open secret”.
After someone at Stanford asked Graeber for permission to forward his summary of accusations to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which da Col had approached for funding, Graeber got the idea of contacting other funders, saying, “What would be ideal would be to have Wenner-Grenn and others in our camp, say, ‘we’d love to give money to HAU but only if it’s a proper collective with an independent treasury etc.’. Let me see if I can talk to her” (p. 47).
They also sent messages to the members of professional selection committees for visiting lectureship positions in the UK where da Col was being considered as a candidate (p. 16), some of whom reassured Graeber that da Col will not “get the post” (p. 34). These covert actions clearly constitute efforts to tamper with hiring and funding procedures.
In contrast, neither Graeber’s coup group or others have produced any evidence that former HAU “staff” had their opportunities or career damaged or derailed by da Col, which was another of the allegations levelled against da Col.
Brief account of the labour relations and the creation of HAU and #HAUtalk, 2011–2018
HAU was conceived in February 2011, based on an idea by Giovanni da Col. At some point in his 30s he dropped out of his Cambridge doctoral programme in order to pursue this unusually successful publishing venture that hoped to revitalize the discipline by drawing on the long history of anthropology and merging it with contemporary ethnographic research and theory.
The project had a long-term vision; in the eyes of many HAU readers and supporters, the very existence of the discipline of anthropology was at stake.
The first issue of HAU was released in December 2011 on a website, with no institutional or grant support from particular universities or associations.
By 2017, HAU became the most cited anthropology journal in Europe and the second most cited journal in social and cultural anthropology, publishing about 1,500 pages a year, more than any other anthropology journal.
HAU also launched an open-access book publishing project with affordable paperbacks (38 titles in the catalogue) printed and distributed by University of Chicago Press. Its books and articles were featured in the mainstream press (NYT, WSJ, NYRB, Times Literary Supplement, etc.) and include contributions by some of the very foremost contemporary thinkers (Piketty, Butler, Agamben, Ginzburg, etc.).
In 2017, the HAU website had almost one million views and a quarter of a million article downloads.
Until 2017, over the course of six years, much of the indispensable editorial work was performed by dozens of anthropology undergraduate and graduate students who volunteered and entered and exited at will into the 100% remote and virtual editorial space of constant paperwork and correspondence. The early phase of the project had relied on the editorial team’s efforts and personal investments as “honorary collaborators” (on a yearly honoraria, or as unpaid voluntary collaborators or as freelance paid collaborators).
The Editor-in-Chief would read all submitted papers, select peer reviewers and read their reviews, make final decisions on acceptance and rejection, as well as independently select books for the symposia and reprints and the like. An editorial intern or assistant, for example, would have to correspond with authors and reviewers and compile the review forms. Associate editors, almost two dozen mainly younger scholars, would provide many of the peer reviews for special issues (for instance, I was an AE in 2016–2017 during my first postdoc in Göttingen). A freelance copyeditor would proofread and format author manuscripts, which were then sent to a professional typesetter in Delhi. Members of the social media team would take weekly turns in promoting HAU publications.
HAU never had an office and most of its volunteers and freelancers had never met da Col in person. The core team of graduate students and junior scholars went through a large turnover (most didn’t stay for more than a year and left in order to enrol in or finish their PhDs), while da Col was the long-running sole Editor-in Chief since 2012. In the first year Justin Shaffner was also Co-Editor-in-Chief, and Michael Lambek (August 2016 to June 2017) and Amira Mittermaier (August 2016 to December 2016) took on the position of Interim Editors to fill in for da Col while he was on an editorial sabbatical.
In May 2017, da Col presented a proposal to the EAB for the deal that would see the University of Chicago Press publish HAU Journal in exchange for absorbing costs and fairly remunerating those involved in its production. The 20 EAB members voted 18 in favor, with two abstentions.
Until 2017, most of the team had been effectively donating their time, even though some of those performing core tasks had the right to claim an annual honorarium, which, as such, was never intended to cover the cost of even basic living expenses.
Most “staff” came in or out with doctoral scholarships and postdoctoral stipends and fellowships, some of which were found via connections with scholars associated with HAU. But even the managing editor, who had many responsibilities, such as collecting annual membership dues from individual university departments and libraries (HAU-NET) to ensure a modicum of honoraria could be paid out at the end of the year, was not paid a salary but worked as a freelancer paid by the hour.
This was not white-collar work, nor market-rate wage labour, nor a part-time student job. So what was it?
A very broke anthropology project. Giovanni da Col himself had lived off a string of fellowships and savings from his previous professional work in the NGO sector in Tibet. Funding for HAU events, which led to special issues, was almost exclusively raised from various applications to foundations. The funding from HAU-NET members became enough to cover some of the costs of the open-access HAU Books series, such as the services of a managing editor, but not others, like book stalls, graphic design, or permissions for translations and the like. Marketing and distribution of HAU Books were supported by the University of Chicago Press starting in 2015.
Da Col, following a recommendation of the EAB in 2015, sought to expand support from HAU-NET members and grants awarded to authors that might include publishing support. Authors from certain wealthy institutions were also asked to inquire if their university library had funds designed to support open-access journals through Author Processing Charge (APCs).
The treasurer of HAU who had full access to all of HAU’s finances in late 2017 publicly declared that da Col did not claim his honoraria in 2016 and 2017 and that he waited for the transition to University of Chicago Press to make sure “all debts” had been first paid. The issue of the outstanding claims to honoraria by former staff who left before the end of their agreed-upon term (which, by the terms of the agreement, meant they would give up their honorarium) were redressed by the Executive Council of the EAB, which was in charge of overseeing the transition of HAU Journal to Chicago and decided to pay honoraria on a prorated basis to six individuals in late 2017 and early 2018 for the time they had spent working with HAU.
In his final editorial note in early 2019, da Col acknowledged that it was a profound “mistake” that “too much work was expected by honorary staff who offered to help for a modest annual honorarium”. In his own words, his “cajoling, moral pressure, and draconian insistence on agreements and societal regulations” had involved holding out parts of the honoraria of those who left halfway through the year or before projects were completed, thus violating the terms of their agreements and the 2013 constitution.
Being denied the honoraria they wanted and deserved despite breaking their agreements led to some unhappy results amongst a handful of people as HAU grew, especially once Graeber and his followers started promoting their own fantasies that Giovanni da Col was “basically embezzling funds and living it up on HAU money” (p. 14).
Da Col contends that his general micro-management or particular moments of virtual outbursts did not constitute workplace “abuse” in any meaningful sense of the term. Telling someone to leave the editorial team if they were not at ease, or imploring someone to stay until the completion of their responsibilities is a type of “contractual” practice that was used during the early days of HAU when it lacked a shared governance structure or clearly-defined bureaucratic responsibilities, similar to small start-up ventures with a CEO.
The early HAU was also modelled on the firm in the sense that only the EAB had “the power to remove an editor who repeatedly violates the constitution or is guilty of malpractice . . . or any other act that seriously and permanently harms the reputation of the Society” (VII.1 HAU 2013 Constitution).
This is why the Three Gs (Graeber, Green and Gershon) strategically recruited a handful of former HAU staff to make growing lists of alleged “malpractices” and, when they didn’t find what they were looking for, decided to usurp the EAB and move towards a campaign of reputational attack that would retroactively legitimate the “removal” of da Col.
Claire Lehmann published her story “How David Graeber Cancelled a Colleague” on 9 September 2019, which she researched through public tweets, documents and comments following the open letters by Graeber and the anonymous “HAU 7”. When she contacted Graeber for a statement, he said that after “a year of behind-the-scenes efforts”, he “finally wrote a public statement”, his “HAU Apology”, on June 11, 2018, which kick-started the social media pile-on and coalesced under the #hautalk hashtag that was created and promoted by the social media team of the journal Cultural Anthropology and the circle of academic friends of “xx”.
The Graeber group’s list of allegations were closely examined by a group of 17 professors (members of the Executive Council of the EAB and the new Board of Trustees formed in January 2018) who concluded that “given the thoroughness with which we were able to review the available evidence of the allegations, I am confident in sharing with you that the bulk of the allegations are not only unfounded, but appear to be purposefully malicious gossip” driven by a “small group of scholars who are actively working to smear the name of HAU and its Editor-in-Chief”.
In addition, in January 2018, the Executive Council of the EAB had made a direct call to past and present HAU staff to submit grievances and discussed the issues with them by phone and email, and which were considered resolved by all the contacted parties. The Three Gs were aware that once “Gio” was “paying people” in late 2017 he “undercut one of our most effective critiques of his behavior. Of course, moving the journal to Chicago [starting December 2017] also means that the people who work on HAU behind the scenes will now be getting paid regularly. So one of our biggest issues will be taken care of”.
This is why Gershon insisted that the public “accusations” of “Plan B” would have to be ones which da Col cannot “deny (or say it was just a misunderstanding and now everything has been cleared up)”, with labels that linger and stick when left unspecified such as sexual “harassment” and “abuse” (p .64).Gershon heavily promoted Plan B, writing, “Let me be clear — we will have to release accusations no matter which plan we choose. It is just a matter of timing” (p. 64).
The timing of the “HAU Apology” and the six-month delay between the late 2017 turn to “Plan B” of the “coup” and the June 2018 creation of #hautalk only makes sense in relation to the escalating dispute between da Col and Graeber and Sahlins, on the other, regarding the latter’s book On Kings published by HAU.
Sahlins, citing the low Amazon sales rank of the book, felt that the book had received too “little publicity”, and throughout the first half of 2018 he deployed his lawyers again to try to bring it to another publisher — long after the book had been published with an open-access Creative Commons license (CC-BY). Sahlins and Graeber made “repeated attempts to terminate the book contract with HAU”, but these finally “fell through”, according to a Sahlins Facebook post on June 11, 2018.
Eight hours later, his former student Graeber pulled the trigger on his hastily drafted “HAU Apology”, which was a simple blend of parts of his first long email to the coup group (pp. 9–11) and his direct message to da Col on December 20, 2017 (pp. 83–86).
Soon after the “HAU Apology”, Sahlins wrote an email to the entire HAU Editorial Board demanding that the “solution to HAU” was to have it “completely divorced from the old HAU”, rename it “Two Crows”, and have “the enterprise turned over to staff (former and present) and their recruits.” Taylor Genovese was also explicit, calling on those who “suffered as a precariat under a tyrannical EIC” to “expropriate it to be run democratically”.
In her tweet to the professors and “PhD students who populate #hautalk” Lehmann notes that “having a dispute with someone over honoraria does not mean that you’re allowed to invent sexual harassment allegations against them.”
It is untenable for anyone to claim that any of the quasi-volunteers depended for their livelihoods on their association with an internet-based non-profit open-access publication or that it was a primary cause of their economic precarity in an academic system held up by grants, teaching jobs or other employment.
It is also specious and invalid to claim that da Col had the capacity to negatively affect the careers of the people who were keen on denouncing and ruining him. The power to select candidates or influence hiring starts and ends with committees of professors, doctoral supervisors and leaders of institutions with open positions.
The image of Giovanni da Col as some sort of “ultra-powerful” “grad student”, as most recently tweeted by Graeber in February 2020, the last of hundreds of perplexing tweets about HAU, was a retroactive but necessary artifice of #hautalk.
Da Col was an editor of a niche theory journal that was far from the institutional centre of the discipline, such as the AAA (American Anthropological Association). Nor did he have an established or secure academic affiliation.
The coup group had closely studied HAU’s constitution (pp. 34, 41) and was fully aware that the EAB was the organ of “adjudication”, that it could intervene in cases of misconduct and that there were formal routes to try to remove an editor. Nevertheless, the Three Gs used social media and a special EASA conference meeting to spread ideas they knew to be false, for example, that HAU had no internal mechanism for addressing grievances or that it was impossible to fire “the autocratic editor for life”.
Graeber and the coup group managed to turn #hautalk into a cult of lament built around non-existent “survivors” of “abuse”, to attract a crowd whose cornerstone of identity is that of being persecuted, used or ignored by the powers-that-be of the academic system. The Three Gs therefore had to imagine “GDC” as some sort of locus of “power” in order to justify their “attack” and prevent any negative feelings and reactions that might arise from the scapegoating that ensued — the #hautalk bandwagon of bad faith artists who think “empathy” consists of spreading damaging lies about a situation they have no knowledge of or connection to, solely to get likes on twitter or promote their profile and blogs.
In the immediate aftermath of the June 2018 scandal, post-#hautalk, Giovanni da Col lost his research position at the SOAS Centre of Ethnographic Theory, which simply shut down the website and removed his pigeonhole for snail mail, the only physical existence of HAU, without contacting him beforehand or asking for his version of the situation. The Head of Department of Anthropology stated that da Col would be suspended until they could conduct their own investigation into the matter, something they never did.
Much of HAU’s old and new leadership, such as the Board of Trustees and the already dissolved EAB, resigned or responded to the call for his resignation. The founding 2013 HAU constitution, which had been co-signed by Sarah Green, Chair of the EAB at the time, was valid until the The Society for Ethnographic Theory became a new non-profit company limited by guarantee in January 2018. The new SET was governed collectively by a board of trustees, composed of Magnus Course, Carlos Fausto, Caterina Guenzi, Niloofar Haeri, Michael Puett, Joel Robbins, Carlo Severi [Chair], Anne-Christine Taylor, Angela Zito, and Giovanni da Col.
In late June 2018, da Col was “suspended” from his positions as Editor-in-Chief and as a Trustee. The only thing left to him was the intellectual property of HAU. He therefore entered negotiations with the few remaining members of HAU’s executive structure, which was replenished with new trustees (later called Directors) in the autumn of 2018 (Kriti Kapila [Chair], John Borneman, Niloofar Haeri, and Anne-Christine Taylor).
Giovanni da Col tendered his resignation as editor-in-chief, effective December 15, 2018. The new Board of Directors also introduced new Bylaws to further develop a clear, transparent document to build a better system for collecting and resolving grievances for current HAU staff. They reiterated their “apology if erstwhile working conditions at HAU have caused damage to former members”.
Da Col had already been relieved of his managerial role in January 2018 when the new Board of Trustees formed to divide up the executive tasks (legal, contracts, hiring and staff issues, HR, diversity, fundraising, website management, events, partnership, etc.). There was finally a clear separation between the executive and the editorial domains, and HAU Journal and HAU Books became separate divisions.
Da Col was instructed to dedicate all his time to the editorial work of the journal (along two new deputy editors, Deborah Durham and Michael Lempert) and the books series (along with Sasha Newell, Julie Archambault and Niloofar Haeri). By early 2018, the editors at HAU Journal were only working with a managing editor at the University of Chicago Press and its production and marketing departments. HAU editors at both the journal and books division also worked with freelancers (designers, copy editors, assistants, IT, etc.), whom HAU could afford to pay more respectable rates.
The Society for Ethnographic Theory no longer used interns or volunteers.
It is relevant that no individual working with or for HAU since 2018 has filed a complaint about working conditions, even after #hautalk.
The fact that Graeber went ahead with “Plan B” and published his “HAU Apology” in June 2018 suggests that he did so not to protect “Hau staff” from da Col but to circumvent the already completed reorganization of HAU so he could fulfil his wish “to kill the bastard” — “once he’s out of HAU, he’s toast” (p. 66).
It should be noted that David Graeber, a popular figure among grad students and younger anthropologists, with over 100,000 twitter followers, considered da Col to be “still a graduate student” (p. 86). He also believed that da Col was “still in uncertain mental health” (p. 43), and thought of him as “bonkers”, “depressed and crazy” (p. 9). Graeber mentions that, given the enormous workload and stress of the HAU editorial position, he had “a record in writing of [da Col] saying ‘I had a breakdown, I can’t handle this, help me!’” (p. 47).
Gershon emphasized these angles in the letter she wrote to the University of Chicago Press director, saying that da Col had a history of “nervous breakdowns” (p. 43) and demanding “for Gio to step down because no anthropological journal of HAU’s importance” should be led by a “graduate student” who “still hasn’t defended his Phd” (p. 64).
But in the coup group, Gershon strategically insisted that, for their planned public letters, “labeling Gio mentally unwell might not be received well by the Anthro community at large” (p. 38), since presumably they did not want to cultivate the image of tenured faculty relentlessly pursuing an overworked and possibly mentally ill PhD student.
Da Col’s mental health and standing in the discipline and his ability to edit or publish or find a professional job has been shattered, since almost everyone reacted by cutting ties with him. Most of the anthropologists whose careers he had helped stopped communicating with him; many of the “elders” whose renown he spent years reviving suddenly didn’t know him and couldn’t help him.
All of his upcoming invited talks, keynote and workshops at the Universities of Oxford, Zurich, and UC Davis were cancelled within two weeks of Graeber’s “HAU Apology”. In the summer of 2018, da Col was planning to move to Paris to occupy HAU’s first-ever physical office space at the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH), which was also supposed to provide space for visiting doctoral and postdoctoral researchers and link up with a network of new Centres of Ethnographic Theory in the global south. The FMSH quietly removed his name from their website without contacting him.
Why did everything fall apart? How did these asymmetric consequences come about? Is anyone feeling better? Is anthropology any better now? Have we all been participants and observers?
In an as-yet-unpublished “long version” of this memorandum, unapologetically Thucydidean and provisionally titled Skandalon: The Formation of an Anthropological Party, I expand on the personal networks and the social and mythical dimensions of both HAU and #hautalk within the ongoing crisis of the university and, as Graeber reminds us, within the structure of “this particular historical juncture”.
Addendum: The “Graeber coup” emails, Jesse Singal and The Chronicle of Higher Education
The science journalist Jesse Singal has had access to the “Graeber coup emails” since October 2019. On the basis of these emails, Singal got his pitch for an article accepted by The Chronicle of Higher Education in December 2019 (publication date currently unknown), which shows both Singal and the CHE editors considered this new evidence to be of public interest.
This view is further supported by the fact that Graeber’s “HAU Apology” was preceded by the specific threat of a social media scandal made in an email sent to da Col on December 20, 2017 (pp. 83–86, also leaked here in 2019) which on twitter was also referred to as the “blackmail email”. Graeber summarizes it as: “I warn him [da Col] of impending catastrophe and basically say everybody hates him” (p. 80).
Also undeniable is that the conspirators contacted a broad range of potential “allies” among notable anthropologists, and reached out to funding intuitions (The Wenner-Gren Foundation, etc.) and anthropology departments in the whole world (at Stanford, at SOAS, at Edinburgh, etc.) with their lists of allegations since late 2017.
Gershon herself confirms that she spread the “open secret” at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting in Washington DC in December 2017, where she set up one-to-one sessions with HAU affiliated people to propagate rumours and negotiate conditions of their support for the planned “coup”, for example: “Debbora now knows much more about what is going on, and was shocked to hear it”; “Golub may support this if HAU is no longer open access. We may need to make a fuss about open access to get some of the people on board” (p. 48). As Graeber also confirmed in his November 29, 2017, email to “xxx”: “we’re going to bring people over to our side, compile testimonies, etc, over the AAA and then hope we can move soon after that.”
Without his involvement, there may still have been conflicts or individual complaints at HAU, however, there would not have been anything near to the crowds that descended on HAU and da Col in June 2018.
For extracts from the “Graeber coup” email threads see the final section of the PDF of the memorandum.