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Not long after Graeber’s note appeared online, so too did two open letters, both anonymous, both allegedly written by several former HAU staff members, and both naming the supposed source of all the trouble: Giovanni da Col, the Ph.D. student who co-founded the journal, edited it, and was the only person to have worked for it since its inception. Among other charges, the letters accused da Col of “personal misconduct, intimidation, and abuse,” unfair docking of pay, and, quoting an anonymous former worker, behavior that “bordered on sexual harassment at times.” (Graeber died on September 2, long after the reporting for this article had been completed.)
On June 18, 2018, just a week after Graeber’s note appeared, more than 80 past and present members of HAU’s editorial board posted a letter calling for a comprehensive investigation of the allegations against HAU. Soon the scandal became all anyone in anthropology was talking about. A narrative took hold among critics of HAU: The controversy, at root, wasn’t just about the journal or its editor, but also the ways in which contemporary anthropology is a morally corrupt, harmful institution in which the powerful prey upon the weak. “The elites doubled down on their privilege, but I am proud of the work many have done in [the] last year to dismantle the violences inherent in North Atlantic Anthro as White Public Space, as a structure of deep colonial capitalist reproduction,” wrote Zoe S. Todd, an anthropologist with more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, in a representative tweet posted in June 2019 marking the one-year anniversary of the scandal’s start. In other words: You can’t separate what happened at HAU from the broader oppressive forces infecting anthropology itself.
Some within HAU, meanwhile, argued that this was all a witch hunt. The Board of Trustees of the Society for Ethnographic Theory, the journal’s umbrella group, fired back with a statement of its own, raising concerns about “destabilizing efforts that have been made toward HAU.” Internal HAU documents started to be posted online, and they seemed to show that some within the journal’s leadership structure were blaming the controversy on disgruntled former staff members, Graeber, or both. Behind the scenes, da Col and his circle of remaining supporters promoted this narrative to journalists. I was originally contacted by someone in this circle in the summer of 2019. Eventually, I found myself corresponding with da Col and two of his allies, who all insisted that Graeber had started a conspiracy against da Col as a result of a grudge stemming from disagreements the two men had over one of Graeber’s books and the future of HAU.
The confusion and controversy thickened in September 2019 when Quillette published an article that echoed the conspiracy story line. Headlined “How David Graeber Cancelled a Colleague” and written by Claire Lehmann, Quillette’s founder and editor in chief, the piece blamed the controversy on Graeber and insisted that, as far as da Col’s alleged bad behavior went, there was no there there. Rather, wrote Lehmann, the controversy was a sign of an “academy that has lost its traditional standards of civility and reasoned debate and is devolving into an arena much like politics, where the cynical and power hungry thrive.”
But Quillette’s account is, at best, incomplete. While it’s true that some of the rumors circulating about da Col were unfounded and over-the-top — and that Graeber appears to have contributed to their spread — former HAU staff and contributors, and a pile of old emails, suggest that da Col indeed regularly engaged in conduct that could be justifiably described as unprofessional and even abusive. He aggressively berated his workers, frequently threatened to sue them for all manner of infraction, and withheld their pay capriciously. This went on so long, according to former staff members, because they feared the reputational damage da Col would threaten to inflict, and because of a strange, back-loaded payment system that enabled him to withhold thousands of dollars that, by the standards of any modern labor arrangement, they were already owed.
But this is just as much a story of institutional dysfunction as it is a story about a very bad boss. Emails show that Carole McGranahan, a University of Colorado at Boulder anthropologist who served as chair of HAU’s external advisory board, was presented with copious evidence of da Col’s bad behavior. But she painted a rosier picture to HAU insiders, one in which a few isolated complainers had been mollified, and in which all outstanding issues had been resolved. This may have been part of the reason there was never a full, transparent investigation into what happened at HAU — and why instead it became a subject of breathless and often half-informed speculation.
However he did it, he really convinced me that I was very bad at what I was doing.
“Bring it back” suggests it had gone somewhere, and in the view of the authors and many others within anthropology, the ethnographic tradition had been drowned out by other intellectual forces. If you insist on interpreting a distant tribe’s rituals and culture through the lens of whoever the trendiest philosophers and theorists are in Europe or the United States at a given moment — as has been the habit of many anthropologists, according to these insurgents — are you really doing justice to the highest ideals and goals of the field? An ethnographic approach geared toward understanding cultures on their own terms, they argued, would be better.
HAU also stood out for its outspoken commitment to an open-access publication model. At a time when the drumbeat of criticism leveled at paywalled research was growing louder, the journal began with the promise of making everything it published available to everyone.
Stéphane Gros, a French anthropologist, recalled the excitement as he, da Col, and Justin Shaffner, the founding editors, planned and hosted a HAU launch event at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, in Montreal. “A new, international, peer-reviewed, open-access and copyleft journal,” read the flyer they handed out, “copyleft” being a reference to a system that is more or less public domain, in that the content falling under it can be distributed freely. Quickly, it became clear the journal was a hit. “I guess what was most surprising was both the scale and the speed of the success,” said Gros. Soon HAU was a top-10 journal in anthropology, according to Google Scholar.
But once the launch afterglow faded, the journal’s virtual workplace — just about everything was handled over email, Skype, and other messaging apps, with the staff scattered over different continents — was beset by problems stemming from da Col’s management style, according to the accounts of numerous former workers. Gros himself never saw things truly sour at HAU firsthand, but he did see some warning signs as it shifted, in the early to mid-2010s, from scrappy start-up to successful, ongoing concern.
“I became really convinced that Giovanni had a clear anger-management problem,” said Gros. “He had sudden bursts of what you could call a temper tantrum.” The first serious indications of trouble came in 2011, when da Col started insulting a collaborator over email and a Skype chat in ways that Gros said he and Shaffner found to be out of line (Shaffner declined to comment). According to Gros, he and Shaffner told da Col that he needed to apologize to maintain the journal’s relationship with the target of his vitriol. Da Col refused. Gros and Shaffner were left with little option but to send the victim an awkward email saying, in effect, That shouldn’t have happened, but Gio is not going to apologize. “That was the very first red flag,” said Gros.
Gros stepped down as managing editor in 2014, in part because he had personal obligations, including a young child with health problems, but also because he didn’t want to deal with da Col anymore. At that point, though, he still felt a sense of connection and loyalty to the journal — and he was confident that he had found a good successor in Sean Dowdy, then a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago (and now a postdoc there). Gros formally stayed on as an editor at large.
But over the years, he heard more disturbing stories, including from Dowdy, and grew disappointed that no one was taking any substantive steps to improve things. So in 2017, at the end of his three-year term as editor at large, Gros chose not to re-up. “I was not willing to remain involved with HAU,” he said, “because there were too many problems [that] I could not, from the position I was in, do anything about.”
One of the most common complaints about da Col was his habit of threatening his workers. “Are you in the game?” da Col wrote to Dowdy in a 2016 email during what Dowdy described as one in a succession of endless minicrises — this one involving an error that da Col accused Dowdy of making. “I will honestly put all blame on you PUBLICLY if something like this goes through because you don’t check or check it too late and screw production. Plus I will sue you for destroying a publication and damaging irreparably the reputation of the press because it’s your job as Managing Editor to check the quality of publications.”
I will decline your offer for an exit interview as it, along with your request for my invoices, is clearly just an attempt to superimpose a professional structure over what has clearly been a pattern of mismanagement.
In another instance, referring to a different person’s mistake, da Col sent Dowdy an email which read, in part, “You’re warned: Next time he plays the damaged party because of a justified reproach I am going to seriously traumatise him for life. I am not kidding. Ask [another former HAU worker who declined to comment]. He is still recovering and going to therapy. ... There’s one thing which drives me berserk and are [sic] people not accepting their mistakes.” In a lengthy statement da Col emailed to The Chronicle, he contended that at the time he and Dowdy were friendly and communicated in a certain crude manner. He referred to this particular email as “the most unfortunate message I sent in 7 years ... it was pure talk shit. I didn’t traumatise and sent [sic] to therapy any former staff member. It was a ridiculous and crazy jest of rage mixed with machismo, which I fully regret.”
Da Col previously sent another disturbing email to Dowdy on February 22, 2015, during another crisis: “Plus if I think how much I invested on advising on your paper and cosmoeconomics since 2012 I only want to beat the shit out of you, seriously,” da Col wrote. Dowdy told me that while he didn’t quite take this threat seriously, his ability to brush it off was complicated by the fact that, as everyone in HAU’s orbit knew by then, da Col had, in fact, been accused of assaulting someone in 2014. (As Dowdy explained in an email, cosmoeconomics is a concept da Col developed “to describe the management, distribution, production, and consumption of universal spiritual forces like the Maori concept of ‘hau,’ which gave the journal its name.”)
The alleged victim was Keir Martin, a British anthropologist at the University of Oslo. He related his experience in a letter he sent to Graeber in late 2017 or early 2018, he recalled. As he explained, da Col arrived in Oslo around Christmas for a research appointment there, and Martin, who would soon be departing for England, had agreed to let him stay at his place. After a late night out, Martin realized he would be late for a key handoff planned for noon at his flat, and over email proposed instead making the exchange at the office they were sharing. When he arrived, da Col quickly laid into him, furious about the delayed handoff.
“He was literally foaming at the mouth — both corners of his mouth had foam coming out,” wrote Martin. “He began screaming over and over again that I was a ‘selfish piece of shit.’ ... I replied, again in a calm tone — ‘you know, Giovanni, I’m doing you a favor here, letting you stay rent free in one of the most expensive cities in Europe over Christmas, so why don’t you just go fuck yourself.’ He looked stunned and asked me what I’d said. I repeated it, and turned to leave the room.”
Martin’s letter continues: “Turning my back on him was my mistake. As I went to leave, I heard a commotion, and as I turned he was pretty much right on top of me. He grabbed my throat with one hand and threw me up against a wall. He’s a strong guy, obsessed with working out and physical strength, and he was able to pin me against the wall easily. He began squeezing on my windpipe. I couldn’t breathe. He was screaming over and over again. ‘You don’t tell me to fuck me. You don’t tell me to fuck me.’” Like da Col, Martin had some martial-arts training, and he was able to free himself. But the assault left a deep mark on him: He missed work for three months, he told me, and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Along the way, he told a number of people what had happened.
A few months later, Martin received a cease-and-desist letter from a Norwegian lawyer hired by da Col, threatening to “pursue all available legal remedies” if Martin continued to talk about the incident with others. “Even if the truth is proved, the allegation is criminal if it is made without any respectable reason for doing so,” it reads in part, quoting from Norwegian defamation law, “or if it is otherwise improper because of the form or manner in which it is made or for other reasons.”
Nowhere in the short letter, which Martin shared with me, is the fact of the assault itself contested. In his statement to The Chronicle, da Col wrote, “I firmly deny this version of events. I never assaulted Keir Martin. We had a strong altercation following a reiterated insult on his part, when I complained after he left me in the middle of Norwegian winter, with all my luggage.” According to Martin, though, da Col initially confirmed Martin’s version of the story to Ingjerd Hoëm, then the head of the social-anthropology department at the University of Oslo, and only changed it when he realized that in the eyes of the university, he had committed a serious breach. Hoëm confirmed this in an email. “I can confirm that Giovanni first expressed that he was in a violent conflict with Keir, and that he subsequently modified this to only involve behavior that he considered within the boundaries of what is normal between friends,” she wrote. She and her administrative head, she wrote, “perceived him as a threat to a safe working environment.” (Da Col also argued that the potential criminal case was dropped because “the allegation was so untenable.” Martin denied this: He said that the Oslo police said they weren’t going to investigate further due to a lack of evidence. Martin also said that da Col had left Norway by the time Martin, encouraged by his therapist, pressed charges.)
Dowdy resigned as managing editor of HAU in February 2017, but this too caused problems. Da Col threatened to withhold money from other HAU workers unless Dowdy did more work to manage the transition. “Giovanni is withholding payment to Sheehan (HAU’s graphic designer) and Deepak (the typesetter) until I commit to performing a ‘transition’ of sorts (30 days of work),” Dowdy explained in a March 5, 2017, email to Sarah Green, then the head of HAU’s external advisory board. Dowdy refused: “For my mental and physical health, I want this man out of my life.”
After Dowdy’s resignation, da Col also told him that he was personally on the hook for half of the costs associated with four titles being published by HAU Books, the journal’s offshoot books venture (Dowdy helped start HAU Books and was its managing editor at the time). “I found that outrageous,” recalled Green. “I think that any bills that were outstanding were HAU’s bills and no particular individual’s bills.” In his statement to The Chronicle, da Col insisted that because of HAU’s legal status as a so-called unincorporated association in Britain, rather than a formal company, “Contracts could be entered only by individuals who carry all risks personally.” That doesn’t track with Dowdy’s description of his time as managing editor: “This is part of what we (the former managing editors) referred to as the ‘shifting sands’ of HAU rules and responsibilities,” wrote Dowdy. “Giovanni constantly encouraged me to sign contracts with third parties though never made it mandatory. I constantly refused because of his description of the legal situation. I did, however, sometimes sign contracts with authors (which Giovanni also signed), but these were commitments to publish only (not commitments for HAU or any of its staff to pay for certain services). In hindsight, he makes it seem as if it was always the duty of the managing editor to handle and sign on any and all contracts, thereby assuming liability. However, things were much less specific, clear, and organized when I was working.”
Green herself resigned in May 2017, frustrated by what she saw as years of drama, missing paperwork, escalating rumors about da Col’s behavior, and a lack of sufficient accountability or structure. Her attempts to discuss these issues with da Col over Skype had not gone well: As she wrote in a resignation letter to da Col and others, “I became increasingly concerned that Giovanni was living in a different reality from the rest of us.”
Green reached a similar conclusion as Gros — that she needed to sever her connection to the journal altogether. “I can no longer be part of that,” she wrote. “It makes me feel like I am complicit in a continual process of finding endless excuses for inexcusable behavior.”
Sean Dowdy’s replacement as managing editor was “Rachel.” She is still a graduate student in anthropology who will eventually be entering the job market, and asked that I not use her real name. Rachel came from a publishing background, having worked at an academic press during and after college. She had heard stories about da Col’s difficult personality, though she wasn’t privy to many of the details. Because she was coming in with publishing experience, she thought she “had standing that people who struggled with Gio didn’t have,” and that “I’d be able to keep him in check.”
Rachel said that da Col’s disorganized approach and propensity to antagonize people in HAU’s orbit made it difficult to run the journal. She would say something like, “If you send me the last un-copy-edited piece of text by this day, I will have you a journal in a month and a week.” But da Col, she said, would often ignore these deadlines. “In reality, he would send me the last un-copy-edited piece of text and want the journal out in two days or three days or four days, every time — every single time,” she recalled. “Meanwhile, Giovanni’s throwing a fit and has to be kept on a leash, but that’s impossible.”
Many of these blowups involved money. Starting in the spring of 2015, HAU began asking authors for so-called article-processing charges, or APCs, to help support its open-access model in lieu of subscription fees. The way it usually worked was this: University departments or libraries often have some funds set aside for these sorts of expenses, so when an author’s piece was accepted, the author would sign an agreement stating that he or she would attempt to obtain funding, if possible. But it was generally understood that this would not be a prerequisite to publication — HAU was open access, after all, and its financial ethos centered on making academic publishing more accessible to all, readers and writers alike.
Rachel, Dowdy, and others related instances in which da Col refused to accept that an author had attempted, but been unable, to secure APC funding. That’s what happened to Amahl Bishara, a Tufts anthropologist who submitted an article to HAU in late March 2016. After what she described as a hectic and unusually rushed editorial process, her article “Palestinian acts of speaking together, apart: Subalterneities and the politics of fracture,” was published in a late 2016 issue. During that process, Bishara informed HAU that she had already used her APC allotment for 2016, but said that she would check to see if she could get an exception. Rachel said she considered this “to be more than a good-faith effort on her part.”
Rachel, as was her routine, followed up with Bishara the following year to check in on whether she could get the funds. She didn’t hear back. Eventually, da Col grew convinced that Bishara had not, in fact, made a good-faith effort. In a July email exchange, he asked Rachel to send Bishara an email threatening to retract the article if she didn’t provide the funds. “I can’t send this email under my name without at least mentioning that I think it’s the wrong thing to do,” Rachel told da Col on July 13, 2017. Da Col’s response read, in part, “unless you want to cover her APC, I have no choice but threatening removal if something is not made to correct this.”
So, later that day, Bishara got an email from Rachel with the subject line “URGENT Suspension of your HAU article.” In it, Rachel, writing at da Col’s behest, threatened to take down the article if Bishara didn’t respond within a few days. Further, “given that more than 7 months have passed since the publication of your manuscript, and you ignored all our messages asking to forward the above material, we now require your institution (or yourself) to cover the relevant publication costs by the deadline of August 31st, 2017. Failure to achieve this will lead to a permanent removal of the article from the issue and the table of contents.”
“This seems a bit punitive, in particular the bit that now you would pull my article even if I received a rejection from my university,” Bishara wrote back. Da Col himself responded: “At this stage, after 7 months of waiting, the burden is on you and your institution,” he wrote. “Should your institution be unable to cover the APC, the best I can do is to offer a 50% discount.”
“I was obviously really surprised — I kind of scrambled to do it,” recalled Bishara. Having a paper disappeared from a publication “would be really bad,” since under normal circumstances that signals fraud, plagiarism, or some sort of major error. Bishara was able to successfully apply for 2017 APC funding from Tufts, resolving the situation. She said she had never heard of an article’s being pulled from a journal for nonpayment of a fee.
Da Col sent The Chronicle a long email disputing these claims, but Rachel, in turn, said that many of his counterclaims were plainly false. For example, da Col said, “I wasn’t even journal editor in 2016, I was [on] sabbatical and replaced by Michael Lambek. I didn’t edit Bishara article or even remotely took [sic] part in the described ‘rushed process.’” While it was technically true that da Col was on sabbatical during this period and didn’t edit that particular article, replied Rachel, in practice, “he was still quite involved (especially if he didn’t like something, he let us have it). I would guess his involvement was weekly rather than daily, but at times I was definitely getting daily emails from him, mostly about production decisions and APCs.” Moreover, “It is completely incorrect to say that the process wasn’t rushed or that [da Col] wasn’t involved in that rush,” said Rachel. “The final issue of 2016 was incredibly rushed. Giovanni insisted that it come out before the end of the year” — though she did say there were “good reasons” to want to hit that deadline.
Another unusual feature of the journal’s policies surrounding APCs was the idea that an employee at HAU might have to pay them. “Giovanni did tell me several times that I would be billed for an APC if an author failed to pay it,” said Rachel. “This was in cases where, say, he decided after the fact that an author ‘should’ have provided funds.”
Like Dowdy, Rachel eventually succumbed to the pressure of her position, resigning in 2017 — though not before what she described as a very difficult summer in which, she acknowledges, she grew increasingly overwhelmed and more or less stopped responding to emails from da Col and doing certain aspects of her job. Rachel said it was very hard to explain to anyone who didn’t experience what went on at HAU what it was like to work there. One of the most surprising things about the experience, she said, was how profoundly da Col had been able to cause her to question everything about her own capabilities — capabilities she’d been confident about when she first started working for him.
“However he did it,” she said, “he really convinced me that I was very bad at what I was doing.”
The managing editors resigned, forfeiting their pay. Which is entirely different from refusing to pay them.
Da Col’s penchant for legal threats became almost legendary among his aggrieved former workers. “He threatened to sue me sometimes weekly,” Rachel explained. Because these threats seemed so far-fetched, they provided some of her only moments of levity working for him: “OK, Giovanni — what court are you going to sue me in?” (In his statement, da Col insisted that he only threatened lawsuits when he believed his staff had actually committed legally actionable acts, like libeling him to others.)
Dowdy, Rachel, and the third managing editor to resign, “Danielle” all accused da Col of unfairly docking their pay (in emails I obtained). According to Dowdy and Rachel, things generally followed the same pattern: Since HAU was run in such a chaotic way, inevitably some sort of mistake would take place. Whether or not it was truly the fault of a given worker, da Col would later point to that error as an excuse to not pay them their full amount. If the staff member quit early, he would attempt to pay them nothing at all. In his statement to The Chronicle, da Col reiterated that, contractually speaking, he was within his rights, according to the system laid out in the constitution that created HAU: The “managing editors resigned forfeiting their pay,” which is “entirely different from refusing to pay them,” he argued. He also described the part of the HAU constitution that created this payment system as an “admittedly foolish article,” and “arguably a perverse and convoluted rule.”
By early January 2018, Carole McGranahan, then interim head of HAU’s external advisory board (Green’s successor), was attempting to get at least some money to those still asking for it, but she appeared to be operating under the assumption that, because of the language in the affidavits, HAU didn’t actually owe anything to workers who had poured hundreds of hours into the journal. Rather, she acted as though she and the journal were doing these former staffers a favor. In a January 5, 2018, email to Dowdy — sent at a time when he believed that, between his roles as managing editor of both the journal and HAU Books, he was owed about $14,000 — she pointed out that he wasn’t actually owed anything by HAU. “Nonetheless, as a goodwill gesture, we — the Editor in consultation with the Board — have decided to offer compensation to previous editorial team members who fell into this category,” she wrote. “We thank you for your service and contribution to HAU’s success.” But there appeared to be a condition: “Please confirm you have no further claims or grievances towards the Society and its representatives and attach an invoice for the above.”
The next day, Dowdy complained about the arrangement to Ilana Gershon, a University of Indiana professor whose guidance he had sought. “So it looks like they will only give me $10,200 in the end,” he wrote. “Probably can’t fight them any more on it (and I desperately need the money).” Noting the “goodwill gesture … caveat,” he wrote that “if that isn’t clearly a payoff for shutting up, I don’t know what is. Anyway, I have to take this money to crawl out of some crippling debt.”
“I am so glad that you are getting $10,000, that is very heartening news,” Gershon wrote in response. “And honestly, the line about ‘please confirm’ is not actually legal. You don’t have to address that if you don’t want to.”
McGranahan phrased the offer slightly differently to Rachel a few days later. After explaining that HAU was doing away with the honoraria system, replacing it with a more traditional payment schedule, she wrote, “With that in mind, I would like to formally confirm two things with you: (1) HAU transferred $4,000 to you for your work at HAU, and (2) that you have no further claims or grievances towards the Society or its representatives.” In her response, Rachel acknowledged having recently received a $4,000 transfer (with no explanation) but said that she was actually owed $6,000, and she made it clear she did indeed have outstanding grievances and would be happy to talk about them. McGranahan disagreed, saying that the correct amount was indeed $4,000. She attempted to wind down the conversation: “I genuinely thank you for input here including your confirmation of no further grievances.” After Rachel replied once more, explaining that under the terms of her contract the correct amount really was $6,000, McGranahan ended the exchange: “I think it is best if we close this email conversation,” she wrote. That was the last Rachel heard from McGranahan on the matter, she told me.
In December 2017, the month before McGranahan’s emails to Dowdy and Rachel, Danielle, who had herself recently resigned, wrote to McGranahan: “I thought it best to formally state my misgivings about the manner in which my departure has been treated as a matter of due course that can be tidied up by the payment of my invoices and an exit interview through which you ‘may incorporate my feedback going forward,’” she wrote, apparently quoting McGranahan. “This, excuse my tone, is a farce.” She continued: “Please disabuse yourself of your assertion that I have not notified you of any serious concerns about Giovanni’s management practices. In fact, I had cc’d you into conversations several times, during which all my concerns apparently fell on deaf ears as I rarely, if ever, heard back from you.” And further: “I will decline your offer for an exit interview as it, along with your request for my invoices, is clearly just an attempt to superimpose a professional structure over what has clearly been a pattern of mismanagement,” she wrote (the boldface is hers). “I find it deeply frustrating that my perspective was solicited only after I chose to resign.” (Danielle declined to comment directly to The Chronicle.)
I am confident in sharing with you that the bulk of the allegations are not only unfounded, but appear to be purposefully malicious gossip.
At the bottom of that note, Danielle sent to McGranahan a list of “Issues you were aware of (as you were cc’d),” which included many complaints similar to those leveled by Dowdy and Rachel, as well as two instances of da Col’s demanding, in emails, that Danielle not discuss her grievances with McGranahan.
About three months after these exchanges with the former managing editors of HAU, McGranahan sent an email to the trustees of the Society for Ethnographic Theory in which she reported that, while there had been some issues involving “graduate students working solely for very modest honoraria paid at the end of each year,” those disputes had been resolved. The real issue here was a smear campaign: “Over time, it became very clear that there is a small group of scholars who are actively working to smear the name of HAU and its editor in chief,” she wrote. “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.”
“When I hold up my email to her, and I look at the email she sent to the board members, it’s just extraordinary to me,” said Rachel. She said she had a similarly strong reaction to McGranahan’s email “thanking her” for not having any further grievances: “That grinds my gears more than pretty much anything else here. … the thing that I feel is disbelief that she would put that stuff in writing to me.”
Whatever the precise details of what happened, the fact remains that McGranahan, who did not respond to requests for comment, appears to have presented this controversy to her fellow board members as a smear campaign underpinned by some unfortunate but minor issues involving aggrieved grad students, rather than a pattern of complaints involving highly unusual behavior and many thousands of dollars in withheld compensation.
In October 2019, da Col’s camp gave me leaked emails which they said constituted smoking-gun evidence that this entire “controversy” had been contrived by Graeber. The material is mostly from a group-email chain, spanning a chunk of November and December 2017. The emails were shared with me by one of the recipients on the condition that I not reveal the names of the junior scholars who participated. Two of the senior scholars on the emails are Graeber (an editor at large at HAU at the time) and Ilana Gershon, and the thread is something of a group strategizing session geared at holding da Col accountable and moving forward with the work at HAU.
But the emails don’t really prove any conspiracy, especially in light of the other evidence available. They do show that Graeber adopted something of a swashbuckling enforcer role as this controversy was percolating. “Too bad I’ve had a falling out with my friend the Bengali princess who used to be a spy; she’d have just worn a wire, allowed [da Col] to pick her up, and got enough out of him in half an hour to probably have him jailed,” he says at one point in the thread. “(She’s suggested doing this to other people I’ve had problems with in the past.) I also know a good number of hackers who could contribute their skills later if we need to investigate the money issues. But again, later.”
It does appear that Graeber helped to spread some overheated rumors about da Col. At one point he tells the group that according to a contact, “one HAU employee [who] owed several thousand dollars says Gio said he couldn’t pay him in money but offered to pay at least part in the form of the services of a professional sex worker?” Perhaps as a result of a game of telephone, this is an exaggeration of what happened. The employee in question is Dowdy, who told me that he had repeated, jokey exchanges with da Col about da Col hiring a professional sex worker for Dowdy (Dowdy shared one of the text chains with me). “On one hand, I did not interpret it as a quid pro quo — i.e., I did not interpret it along the lines of ‘Giovanni is offering me a sex worker instead of my honorarium.’ It was fairly clear to me that he did not make this offer as an alternative to cash payment.” On the other, said Dowdy, da Col used the term “HAU bonus,” so despite the jokiness he did interpret it as a serious offer of a sort of gratuity — an offer made at a time when Dowdy was owed thousands of dollars by da Col. (In his statement, Graeber said that he had heard this rumor through the HAU grapevine, had discussed the issue with Dowdy, and that “we concluded that neither of us had any idea if the offer was serious or not.”)
Elsewhere in the thread, Graeber repeatedly says da Col committed serious acts of financial fraud. “Very large sums are being squirreled away somewhere, and I think I might know who knows where to look,” he writes. “I’m checking into this.” Graeber never provided any evidence to support this claim, though, and Rachel, Dowdy, and Green all told me that while da Col had been quite aloof about the journal’s general finances, and acted in a manner they viewed as exploitative when it came to paying his workers, there was no evidence he was enriching himself. “I never saw any sign at all that Giovanni was doing anything fraudulent or illegal with money,” said Green, who in her role as head of the external advisory board had access to some of HAU’s financials. Rather, in her view, he was merely disorganized with money.
In his statement to The Chronicle, da Col said that he had had a chartered British auditor look into the journal’s finances, and nothing was amiss. He also connected me with Maria Luisa Nodari, treasurer of the Society for Ethnographic Theory, who sent me a statement she signed in 2018 covering the years 2015-17: “I hereby declare there are no traces of suspicious transactions, large money transfers and cash withdrawals, unusual expenditures for costly meals or hospitality items, or purchasing of inappropriate items for the activities of the society,” she wrote. (“The quote is taken from the very first conversation that was taking place between myself [and the other participants] on 14 November 2017 when we were trying to all get on the same page, figure out what was happening at HAU, and what we might be able to do about it,” said Graeber in a statement to The Chronicle. He also pointed to a November 2018 group email exchange that Green had been on, in which she had mentioned da Col’s “failure to keep proper accounts; failure to write annual reports; failure to declare income for tax purposes; failure to pay bills on time; failure to pay honoraria on time, or even at all.”)
Graeber sent to The Chronicle an ambiguous text exchange in which da Col said that he hadn’t taken his salary in years and that he was going to “empty” HAU’s bank account, apparently to backpay himself for that span. Da Col followed up with a further, mysterious text: “I mean metaphorically empty.” He didn’t explain what he might mean, but this looks to be a reference to back pay rather than proof da Col was, as Graeber seemed to be saying in his email, squirreling away large sums that were due to others.
The absence of any big, visible, transparent investigation created a vacuum into which rushed innuendo, speculation, and many people’s agendas.
Graeber also appears to have exaggerated an accusation of violence leveled at da Col. “He’s been abusing a lott [sic] of people, were incidents of violence again,” he wrote to one of his correspondents on the thread in late 2017. When I asked Graeber about this, he said he was mistaken, and was instead referring to a fuzzy-seeming incident from about a decade earlier involving da Col and another scholar getting into a scuffle (da Col denied any such scuffle occurred). In his statement to The Chronicle, Graeber explained that he later found out that his source for this claim had been confused, and that he had passed on this correction to the recipient of his email. But the recipient of the email said she never received such a correction from Graeber. “I do not recognise this version of events,” she wrote, responding directly to the text Graeber sent The Chronicle. Da Col, for his part, said in an email, “Graeber’s action cannot be justified as simple failed fact-checking. He is the most famous anthropologist in the world and his 3 December email ... had head[s] of departments around the world.” This is a reference to an email that Graeber sent to a group of anthropologists in which he had referenced among other charges, “physical intimidation and threats, [and] additional (if less dramatic) incidents of physical violence.”
As for the sexual-harassment allegations that quickly became a part of the Twitter discourse surrounding da Col, they also appear to have been overblown by internet rumor-mongering — some of it exacerbated by Graeber. There is at least some evidence that Graeber saw this as a potentially useful cudgel: “One problem right now is that we have like 50 little scandals but what we need is a really big one,” he said in an email to the group, which was leaked online and which Lehmann mentioned in her Quillette article. “If you release the 20+ bad things [da Col] did he’ll just choose the weakest one and trumpet to everyone that it was a lie, and dismiss the others. The ideal thing would be a super-clear case of sexual harassment.”
After the Quillette article came out, Graeber suggested on Twitter that this had never really been a main concern: “Interesting that the line that [Quillette] is pursuing — trying to pretend #hautalk was a sexual harassment issue & relating it to #MeToo — was exactly the strategy pursued by HAU itself, who kept trying to divert the convo to sexual harassment & even ran a special issue on MeToo.” But as Lehmann pointed out in some screenshots she tweeted, Graeber himself, in both public tweets and his correspondence in the group email chain, made it pretty clear that he believed sexual harassment was an important allegation against da Col.
This is the weakest part of the case against da Col, though. While those who worked closely with him agreed that he had a generally bawdy manner, and that he would often make sexual remarks and comments, no HAU workers I spoke with said they had seen evidence of outright sexual harassment.
There appears to be only one person in the HAU orbit who accused da Col of anything along these lines — a participant in the group email thread who asked to remain anonymous because she’s early in her career — and she described the behavior as “borderline” sexual harassment (a claim echoed in one of the open letters). The context of her complaints complicates things a bit. She wrote to me, and in the thread, that da Col would “say things like he wished he could do ‘physical exercise fieldwork’ with me followed by a little winking emoji. He would make vague promises of flying me to international conferences to represent HAU in order to get me to take on extra HAU editorial work only to then tell me what kind of outfit he imagined or ‘hoped’ I would wear — ‘a nice black dress and heels.’”
But in the chat logs da Col shared — his accuser said she didn’t have any — things are a bit different. There appears to be a fairly intense friendship, sometimes flirtatious, and it seems reciprocal. Da Col’s comment about doing fieldwork together comes after his accuser has already raised that possibility, so it doesn’t seem particularly untoward. When I asked her about this, the accuser acknowledged that the flirtation had originally been mutual, but said that later on she felt things had soured and grown uncomfortable. The only real disagreement, other than questions over how to interpret flirtatious text communication, has to do with the “nice black dress and heels” comment, which da Col insists didn’t happen and which his accuser insists did.
Overall, though, these chat logs do not appear to reveal clear-cut sexual harassment, even of the ‘borderline” variety. Nevertheless, sexual harassment became a substantial part of this story as it unspooled online.
In part because of this leaked correspondence, da Col remains convinced he is the victim of a conspiracy — that while there were certain, since-rectified problems with his style as a manager, his misdeeds are dwarfed by the scope of the machinations which brought him down. “Perhaps it will kill GDC forever so if there’s anything outside GDC which is capable to endure, that part, if [it] exists and survives, can start living again, under a different guise,” he said in an email to The Chronicle.
Graeber, for his part, said he was worried that a focus on his own leaked correspondence, and particularly on what he described as “sarcastic remarks by a whistle-blower in a private email to three other HAU staff,” would deter future spotlights on bad behavior. “It’s not so much that I’m worried for my own sake — my reputation can withstand the charge of being overzealous against someone who’s now generally acknowledged to have been a menace — as for whistle-blowers in general,” he wrote.
It certainly appears that Graeber was, at times, quick to pass along unvetted rumors to others within anthropology, but the problem with da Col’s story is that there is such a long, consistent line of complaints and concerns about his behavior — one that stretches back at least to 2014, and that includes not one but three consecutive managing editors resigning early, and which long predates any evidence of Graeber’s direct involvement. There is scant evidence to suggest that Graeber played a bigger role in causing da Col’s downfall than did da Col’s own behavior.
What’s interesting about this anthropology scandal, from an anthropological perspective, is how the absence of any big, visible, transparent investigation created a vacuum into which rushed innuendo, speculation, and many people’s agendas — perhaps making things worse for just about everyone involved.
As Rachel and Dowdy watched the scandal morph and unfold online, they grew frustrated with just how disconnected the discourse became from their own experiences. “After it became public, all these people are tweeting about it — people I know, who I have worked with before, who know I worked for HAU — and nobody ever sent me an email like you sent me and said, What happened? No journalist, no investigating AAA [American Anthropological Association] body or EASA [European Association of Social Anthropologists] body,” said Rachel. “Nobody who worked for HAU who defended HAU.” (Rachel, Dowdy, and Keir Martin all expressed significant gratitude that Graeber had gotten in touch and listened to their stories.)
Instead, Rachel and Dowdy watched many anthropologists with tangential-at-best connections to the scandal quickly develop — and broadcast — strong feelings about it. “I’m at a conference, I’m in a circle of people at a cocktail hour and it’s like Do I tell them? Do I not? Do I just listen to their weird opinions about this thing that happened in my life?” said Rachel.
She remembered one panel at an American Anthropological Association conference focused on the HAU scandal that didn’t include anyone with firsthand knowledge of it, except for one former intern. “I think it’s just a problem of the culture of academia where we think we are very, very, very good at speaking as experts, that’s our thing, and people don’t know how to speak about something when they are not an expert on it,” she said. In Rachel’s view, nonexperts dominated public discussion of the scandal.
Dowdy felt similarly, and referenced the same AAA event. “Students and scholars are using this opportunity to air their own grievances, or, in the case of the senior faculty, what can only be called a gross attempt at building their titles as activist-anthropologists, in securing that forum,” he said. “And it just seemed so disingenuous.”
HAU has made some changes since this controversy broke. The payment structure was reformed. Da Col was ousted as editor. But there still hasn’t been an official accounting of exactly what happened, and how. Instead, the scandal has just sort of festered, one tweet and rumor at a time.