Nika Dubrovsky:
I was thinking, okay, so that would be like a good combination, to make a different type of textbooks that would not be prescriptive. The textbooks that will look eye-to-eye to the children and that allow them to write, together with the authors, their own book about this major concept.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I'm Alec Patton, and that was the voice of artist and author Nika Dubrovsky. Nika has done a lot of very interesting stuff, but she's most famous for her collaboration with, and marriage to, the anthropologist David Graeber, who died suddenly in 2020 at the age of 59. Over the past four years, I've got very into David Graeber's work. It started in 2021 when I read The Dawn of Everything, which he co-wrote with the archaeologist David Wengrow. This book changed how I see the world and ignited a sense of hope in me that has stubbornly refused to go out ever since. The Dawn of Everything is 600 pages long, so I won't try to summarize it, but I'm going to read a passage that gets to the heart of what it's about. Here it is.

"As long ago as 1936, the prehistorian V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself. Apart from the sexist language, this is the spirit we wish to invoke. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approach human history that way? What if we treat people from the beginning as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourself."

There's another quotation from David Graeber that puts this point more succinctly. "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." This is what I keep in mind whenever I start to feel hopeless about the state of the world, and I've kept reading David Graeber's work. The next book I read was Debt: The First 5000 Years, which Nika and I talk about a little bit in this episode. This year I read his posthumous collection of essays titled The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World. The title comes from that quotation I just read to you.
I was trying to figure out how all this reading might connect to my day job as editor of Unboxed when I discovered that before he died, David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky had started a project called Anthropology for Kids, inspired by the conversations about the world that they were having with Nika's young son. They created books about anthropological concepts that are designed to be drawn and written in. That's what that clip from Nika at the top of the episode was about. She's also started facilitating what she calls visual assemblies, which are workshops where people of all ages design cities together by drawing them on giant sheets of paper, and she's just published a book, Cities Made Differently, with MIT Press.
I sat down with Nika Dubrovsky to talk about the origin of Anthropology for Kids, and how you can use their resources today both in and out of school. We also talk about how the project was inspired in part by Nika's experience reading children's literature when she was growing up in the Soviet Union. But we start by talking about how Nika and David met. She first encountered him on TV being interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show in 2006 after Yale University decided not to renew his contract. She was impressed. I let Nika take the story from here.

Nika Dubrovsky:
I just Googled him and wrote him and said, "Oh, can I take an interview from you for Russian Press?" Because I was blogging at that time and I was writing to a variety of Russian media online. So he just replied me instantly and say, "Oh yes, definitely, let's meet tomorrow in Union Square, because I'm nearby." So that's how we met. We just met in the morning and we were working all day, and he was just such an amazing person.
And then sometimes after that he left to UK, I left to Berlin. He was doing tours for his Debt book, so he came to Germany, and I came to the UK, and we were talking on Skype. He was sending me chapter by chapter that book when he was writing that via email.

Alec Patton:
That's cool.

Nika Dubrovsky:
Yeah, and that was the moment when I actually find out about what is anthropology. I also suddenly had a lot of anthropologist friends in New York in that time, I didn't know much about anthropology before, and I had a small son, and I was thinking a lot about education, and so that's how the idea to make Anthropology for Kids was born, out of this communication between David and my then very small child.

Alec Patton:
So Anthropology for Kids started with you reading draft chapters of Debt?

Nika Dubrovsky:
Yes, and also I was really involved mother, so I constantly talked to my child, and then I also described David when we met. So we talk a lot about Soviet Union and the US, because we grew up in this rival countries, so part of the conversation was about education, and also about Soviet children literature. That was a model for Anthropology for Kids kind of, because that was one of the most progressive space after the revolution. It was very quickly after the revolution, Stalin start to crack down on Russian avant-garde. Some people lost their lives, some people immigrated, but it also was a safe place for the artists and writers to do children books, and many of the great artists just immigrated, internally immigrated into the children literature, and that was the reason why it was so amazing, and it stay amazing throughout '60s and '70s.
So in a way, Soviet communism that didn't exist in the real life was depicted and discussed in the Soviet literature. So children literature become this social glue that's created this new entity, Soviet people that didn't exist before. So children literature is a great and very important and super political tool in a way for education and for changing common sense, what David called revolution. So he was saying revolution is not when we take over the policies, but when we change common sense.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Going back now to the origins of the ideas that become Anthropology for Kids, you're reading draft chapters of Debt and you've got a very young child, and this might seem just absurdly basic, what is anthropology?

Nika Dubrovsky:
For me, anthropology first of all was the amazing opportunity to look at the world through the eyes of the different cultures, because I realize whatever we are teaching our kids, we are teaching them in a very narrow perspective of how we think the world built in our culture. And it's really crucial to be able to show children, and everybody else, how other people in different cultural and social arrangements relate to the key questions. Everybody have a concept of what is family, what is house, what is the city that they want to live in, and so on and so forth. What is death? That's very important too. But if we wouldn't be able to expose ourselves or children to these different ideas, we actually will live in a very dangerous world, because only by looking through the eyes of somebody else we can have a full understanding, or a much wide understanding, of what is actually going on in our reality.
And so that, and all the other text of David, starting from his first book, the book that he wrote in Madagascar called Magic and Slavery in Madagascar, it was his favorite book, that is going to be republished with a new introduction next year. That's all already you have these ideas of all being endless variety of possibilities of different social arrangement and us living in this, basically have to work through them with each other so we can build something different.

Alec Patton:
When you were reading these chapters of Debt, how old was your son?

Nika Dubrovsky:
I think when David came to Berlin for the presentation of that, he was six years old.

Alec Patton:
What were you looking for for him?

Nika Dubrovsky:
So what I wanted for my child, and for every kids, I was thinking about what was called in Soviet Union House of Culture. David and I wrote about this in our collection of the essay Another Art World, I think in the third one that was about Alexander Bogdanov, who did this project called Proletkult, a network of houses of culture. And so House of Culture was a place, something like a free and democratic school now where the child can come and learn whatever, from ballet to craft, from theater to mathematics, from chess to, I don't know, singing, that cost almost no money, and it was so good that it exists after collapse of Soviet Union, when the government stopped almost funding these things because there was so much entangle in the life that they become part of the, I don't know, everyday common sense. And it produced a lot of great results, like all these Soviet famous chess people, many of them from there, like mathematical classes.
So that's all result of this kind of freedom of choosing what you want to study, doing it with the people that you chose when you chose to do that. And since I was a contemporary artist, and this was super interesting, it's really changed my understanding of the world when I read that, I was thinking, okay, so that would be a good combination, to make a different type of textbooks that would not be prescriptive, the textbooks that will look eye to eye to the children and that allow them to write, together with the authors, their own book about this major concept. And so the ideas was to talk to the children about doubt, important question, and integrate them into that conversation. So that's my understanding about how we should relate to children, it shouldn't be like children is somebody else, something else, and you have to be spoken in a special language about special subjects.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. I'm very curious about the workshops that you do. When did the first Anthropology for Kids workshop take place?

Nika Dubrovsky:
First of all, I started to do children books because I was living in the US with a small child, and I didn't have money for babysitting, so I was kind of forced to do it myself. And that's how I started to produce a lot of art around children and education, while I was taking care of them.

Alec Patton:
Just because you had to keep your child occupied in some way?

Nika Dubrovsky:
I was staying with my child and I was just, yeah, I was thinking, okay, so I was producing a lot of books for him, and I also was doing the workshops with him and his friends, instead of babysitting I was just doing art project with group of kids, and that's how it slowly evolved.

Alec Patton:
So what did you do? Tell me about these art projects.

Nika Dubrovsky:
I was doing this collective mapping, like we would draw some, I don't know, pirate islands and cities, and so on. And then when I realized, okay, so actually the Anthropology for Kids book is something for a conversation between office and child, but it's still an individual activity, a private one, so it makes sense to make them collective and to make it as a more group activity when the conversation hold in a group. And then after Occupy, from one side it was super cool because it changed, Occupy Wall Street changed the public language. So it was definitely success, and it's went viral throughout the world, but it's also was violently suppressed, and if you think what people were doing there, they were just trying to talk to each other in the public space. And I just realized, and we talked with David about this, that it's an extremely important privilege that we are lacking in our culture to have this public spaces where we can talk to each other.
And then because I was interested in kids, it's one thing, another thing I was a migrant, so English is not my first language, and I don't have an academic background. So when we were talking about citizens assemblies, and in general assemblies, I was asking questions like who can actually speak there and be heard? Probably it's like people who are native speakers and who has the skills to be public speakers. And if you child a migrant, or person without the skills, it's a bit difficult for you to promote your opinion if you want to come to the collective decision making or consensus about certain specific topics. And then I just kind of proposed this experience that I had to do this collective art workshops with kids, and David and I call it Visual Assembly and organize it in a way that could involve actually everyone, because you can talk, but you also can write.
And a good example of Visual Assembly I did in November in Disobedience Archive in New York, and they were a bunch of adults, mostly activists, archeologists, architects, and so on, but it also was a few little girls, from five to seven years old. And actually these few little girls was most active, not in talking, but in writing and arranging the city. They draw a huge river throughout the map, they just make the roads and the bridges, and so on so forth. So it's kind of like a more democratic space, because images in a way are more democratic than public talking that require a lot of skills. But I did this workshop with Anthropology for Kids in many different countries, in Iceland, Cuba, Germany, UK, and so on, so that also was fun.

Alec Patton:
Talk me through what happened at one of those. Who did you invite? What did they see when they came in?

Nika Dubrovsky:
So, for example, I describe one in Romania, Timisoara town. So I think it was some festival and I was invited to give this workshop, so I put two tables, I put one map was kind of pre-designed for utopian city, and another was pre-designed for dystopian city and the kids, who were around 10 years old, divided into two groups, utopian and dystopian, and then they started to draw the city, and they would constantly go between tables and take a look of what another table going on.

Alec Patton:
And how big was this table? How big was the map?

Nika Dubrovsky:
Maybe one meter 20 centimeters, so it's a big table and a big map. And they all start to draw from their own corner, our laws ask them to draw their own house, or the house of their friends, and then kind of expand. And when they expanding, they meet each other, so they have to negotiate how we build a road together, what will be in the center, and so on. And that's a good strategy because when you start from your own space, if you're like shy kid, you don't need to negotiate with anyone, you just do your own thing, you just start to create that right away. But then even the shy kid, if somebody else is trying to get into his space, they will draw something to protect themselves, or go into the negotiation. That's the aim of the whole thing, is to try to facilitate a collective discussion how we can live together.
So in this workshop, the kids wanted to stay forever. They were really keep developing their ideas. It was very hot, the tables were outside in the garden in the observatory of Timisoara. So all adults and the parents of the kids, they really wanted to go home after two hours, there was no water somehow, but the kids didn't want to go, they want to stay and they want to continue. And the interesting things in this group dynamic was that I noticed that it doesn't matter which country, which language, the horror scenarios are always poetic. So people are coming up with full kind of crazy things like vampires or dungeons or some robots that is, I don't know, doing something from the sky, some surveillance cameras that follow the citizen.
But the utopian city is always very logical, especially if the kids are older, they mostly write them and not draw them, because they're kind of asking themselves questions, what we going to do with migrants? Okay, we have to build a big house where everybody will be hosted, we don't want to have people sleeping on the streets. What are we going to do with hospitals, how we will arrange the, and so on and so forth. So they started to kind of logically try to solve the problems.
And as you know, utopia is translated as a place that don't exist, but in order to build utopia, or whatever, the place where they want to live, people are, and it doesn't matter what age and which country, become very practical, and everybody has a lot of ideas, looks like, where they want to live, how do they want to live, and actually even how they can build it if they have the whole power of these things, if they don't need to do some magical, I don't know, political dancing and convince some sponsors or whoever we need to convince to do anything in our lives right now, if they control the space themselves, they're super creative and quick. So that's very encouraging, I would say.

Alec Patton:
For a teacher who's interested in using, I'll say Cities Made Differently, but if you'd rather focus on a different book, that's fine, and they want to set up a Visual Assembly to happen in their class, what's your advice? How would you get started with that?

Nika Dubrovsky:
I have to check, maybe I didn't put the, I call it tablecloth, because I like the idea of something very kind of homemade, something where you can share food. So I think I put it online, but if not, I can just, after we finish, I will go online and put this tablecloth or posters for free downloading. So I suggest they download that and they print it. I don't know how much it's cost to print in the US, it's quite cheap to print, like $20 to print a big one on a good paper, yeah, and then just have a bunch of markers and draw together. Take a picture, send it to us, we will post it, we're happy to post it in our website and distribute for our friends.
That's actually very important because the kids do want to see that they're doing something that would exist somewhere, so they're planning something that other people will discuss, because they're generally putting a lot of energy in theirs to do so. And also because it's pre-designed and it has some collages, so that it's a drawing on top, it actually looks good all the time. It doesn't matter what they draw so much. So you can use it as a public art projects, you can post it on the walls, and so on.
So I did a big project in Iceland where it was a government just provided us with a small plane, so we were flying through the island, and at once we did a project in a school with 200 kids at once. We put them on the different tables and they produced a lot of this tablecloths plans for the city. And that was an amazing exhibition. So after they finished that, the administration of the school posted on the big wall, and that looks beautiful. So it's quite easy.

Alec Patton:
What are you planning, what are you designing right now?

Nika Dubrovsky:
So actually the book that was published by MIT, I'm re-editing it because it was, yeah, I'm just re-editing this. This book was sold out in the first month, and so there would be new edition and it'll be a little bit different than the first edition, I hope better. And then I'm writing two more books, Museums Made Differently and Artists Made Differently. So Cities Made Differently is a collection of the social situations, and Museums is a collection of the places where value created, why we decided this is important and this is not, and how we come up with this ideas. And then the Artist is about different ideas of what is human nature, like artists as the business person, artists as an activist, artists as a magician, and so on and so forth.
So in the same things as in all Anthropology for Kids books, they just a collection, and ideally we're not imposing anything on the reader, we're just kind of facilitating the discussion with the hope that they're going to make up their own mind. And then the fourth book I want to do with Michael Hudson, as I already described. And then I have some other things in mind, like Peter Sahlins, who is a son of Marshall Sahlins, David's teacher, he's working a lot on projects about libraries and books themselves, so we want to do a book about books. Books made differently, a library made differently, so the idea of what is reading.

Alec Patton:
Oh cool. For other teachers who are, maybe they've read The Dawn of Everything, they're thinking about this work, they've come to David Graeber's writing and they're thinking about, this feels really important, I want students to be thinking about this, I want students to be thinking about anthropology and how the world doesn't need to be how it is right now. How do you recommend they get started on translating that into what's happening in their classroom?

Nika Dubrovsky:
Oh, please just download, I think I will put more and more online for free, this materials, so please download them, print them, use them in the classroom, write back. There is also people who started to write to me and ask if they can produce their own books in the framework of Anthropology for Kids, that's great. Somebody is writing a book about do it yourself, how we produce things in a way. So I just hope that this project will grow, because eventually it's a project about different type of education. But again, we want to do it in existing places where kids and teachers already are, and then just reform it from inside.

Alec Patton:
And if a teacher wants to create that dialogue and to share with you all, what's the best way to do that?

Nika Dubrovsky:
Oh, write an email or, I don't know, maybe somebody will want to facilitate. I don't have a time capacity for doing that, but it will be great maybe to make some Discord group or Reddit connected to Anthropology for Kids, maybe somebody will want to manage that. I would reply always if I get an email, I'm very grateful to everyone who is interested in that ideas.

Alec Patton:
Wonderful. I think that's a great, great, great, great place to end it. Thank you so much.

Nika Dubrovsky:
Thank you.

Alec Patton:
Hi, High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Nika Dubrovsky for this conversation. Nika referenced lots of stuff in this episode. We've done our best to include references to all of it in the show notes. Thanks for listening.