How One Prominent Journal Went Very Wrong
Threats, rumors, and infighting traumatized staff members and alienated contributors. They blame its editor.
By Jesse Singal
OCTOBER 5, 2020
On June 11, 2018, David Graeber, an anthropologist known for books like Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and for being a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street protests, posted an apology on his website. The note was about HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, an anthropology journal Graeber helped start in 2011, which had quickly established itself as one of the most innovative and exciting publications in the field. Graeber referenced “alleged physical violence” and the “shocking ways” in which workers and contributors had been treated, and said that management of the journal had been “grossly mishandled.”
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.
HAU: A Journal of Ethnography arrived in 2011 with a bold goal, summed up in the title of the foreword to the inaugural issue: “The return of ethnographic theory.” HAU, which is pronounced “how” and named for a Maori religious concept, “is a call to revive the theoretical potential of all ethnographic insight, wherever it is brought to bear, to bring it back to its leading role in generating new knowledge,” wrote the authors of that article — Giovanni da Col and David Graeber.
“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.”
Once he replaced Gros, Dowdy became the first of three consecutive managing editors to depart their posts early under ugly circumstances. All three told strikingly similar stories to me or to others.
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.”
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.”
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.)
So why didn’t they just quit? In Dowdy’s telling, part of it was simply that they believed in the project itself, which inspired real loyalty, and part of it was fear of the sundry consequences da Col promised if they left, which tended to center on reputational damage. But, especially in the case of those who put in the most hours, da Col also had leverage because of HAU’s strange payment system. As managing editors, they would receive a few thousand dollars per year or so for their work. But they were paid via an agreement, laid out in affidavits that they and da Col signed when their tenures began, in which they would get only one lump-sum salary payment at the end of their term. This meant that if they quit early, they risked walking away with nothing.
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