The Memory Bank

The Memory Bank claims to be about making a more effective Commonwealth. So far I haven’t been very explicit about what that might mean. At the very least it means exploring the idea of what we have in common. And this short animation makes an excellent job of outlining what is involved.

John C Turmel is a professional gambler, perennial candidate in Canadian elections and a ‘banking engineer’ with a longstanding interest in currency issues. Visit his website. He recently got hold of an article I wrote in 2002 comparing the Argentinian peso and the euro: A tale of two currencies, Anthropology Today, 18. 1: 20-22. The result is a reading and commentary in two parts posted on YouTube, lasting ten minutes each. These may be of more interest to me than to the casual watcher, but I post them here for the combination of media (vlog and reading), as well as for their content.

Part 1

Part 2

Machines, money and people in the formation of a global society. A lecture in five parts given at Goldsmiths, University of London on 23rd October 2007. Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola.

Part 1

The rest of the lecture can be found here:

• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

One in a series of World Summits on Free Information Infrastructures (WSFII) took place 1-3 October 2005 at Limehouse Town Hall in London. A programme of talks, demonstrations and discussion on free networks, alternative currencies, civic information, infra-red networks, open geodata and mapping, was preceded by a week of workshop ‘streams’ including a book writing project : ‘Wireless for Development’.

Keith Hart spoke about the political possibilities of alternative currencies. In three Youtube segments, he discusses his online project the Memory Bank and the relationship between intellectual property, the information age and the emergence of new monetary systems (and value).

Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola.

Part 1

The rest of the lecture can be found here:

• Part 2
• Part 3

1. LETS and Me

All my life money has been an obsession. When I was 5, I was bewildered by the relationship between rationing coupons and pocket money. When I was 12, I took up betting on the horses. Gambling saw me through university. I even became an entrepreneur in the slums of a West African city as part of my doctoral fieldwork. I put together a small real estate fortune during the 70s and then lost it when I was divorced. So, when I was asked to give a public lecture to my fellow anthropologists in the mid-80s, it was perhaps not surprising that I hit upon the topic of money. I brought plenty of personal experience to my subject, none of which showed in my official presentation. I called this ‘Heads or tails?’, referring to the two sides of the coin, one representing money as an aspect of political society, the other its value as a commodity in exchange. My argument was that both sides were indispensable to money, but for much of the 20th century we had been subjected to ruinous swings between theories emphasizing one side to the exclusion of the other. The lecture was published in Man, 1986. Continue reading ‘Two pieces on money for a Japanese magazine’ »

Has been published in a new open source journal created by the Association of Social Anthropologists, ASAOnline.

See the original keynote lecture of the Rethinking Economic Anthropology conference held at the LSE on 11th and 12th of January 2008 here as streaming video.

World society has been formed as a single interactive network in our time. Universal means of communication are now available to give expression to universal ideas. This essay explores the role of markets and money in the human economy. They are intrinsic to the extension of society from the local to a global level. By calling the economy human we put people first, making their thoughts, actions and lives our main concern. ‘Humanity’ is a moral quality of kindness and, since theoretical abstraction is impersonal, economic anthropology should pay attention to the personal realm of experience. But ‘humanity’ is also a collective noun, meaning all the people who have existed or ever will. So the human economy is inclusive in that sense too, requiring us to engage with society in its impersonal dimensions. Money mediates the personal and impersonal extremes of social existence. These reflections lead us to Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). ‘Anthropology’ is indispensable to the making of world society. It would then mean whatever we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a more equal world. This usage could be embraced by students of history, sociology, political economy, philosophy, geography, cultural studies and literature, as well as by some anthropologists.

Is informal economy plus information technology a path towards economic democracy?

This essay is frankly autobiographical. It is an attempt to excavate the intellectual and political connections between my early and later work in economic anthropology. Continue reading ‘IE + IT = ED?’ »

In the wake of market fundamentalism

We have lived in the last three decades through an explosion of money, markets and communications and are now beginning to experience the consequences. Whatever else this hectic period of ‘globalization’ brings, it represents a rapid extension of society to a more inclusive level than the twentieth-century norm which identified society with the nation-state. In order to live in the world together, we have to devise new ways of doing things for each other that go beyond our attempts to achieve local self-sufficiency. I call this historical process ‘commoditization’ (Hart 1982), the evolution of methods for making work social, so that it can circulate in the form of commodities. This essay is one such commodity. It does not have to be sold, but it was written with the aim of finding some limited circulation in this form. So far in history commoditization has been closely linked to the extension of society by means of markets and money. But there are other means and they may become more important as a result of the digital revolution in communications — and no doubt other factors. Continue reading ‘On commoditization: exchange in the human economy’ »

One Saturday morning in 1980, I found myself addressing a large, mainly black working class audience in Detroit on the subject of the Atlantic slave trade. I was claiming that, before the industrial revolution, relations between Europeans and Africans on the Guinea Coast were relatively equal. The Africans supplied the slaves and the Europeans bought them. At this point, a huge man sitting on the front row suddenly stood up:

Man: You sayin’ we slaved our own people, motherfucker?
Keith: Well, yes, I suppose…yes.
Man: How you know?
Keith: Oh, historical records – Portuguese, Dutch, French, British records.
Man: Any black people write them records?
Keith: Ah yes, good point. We do rely mainly on what white people wrote then.

He sat down and, rather shaken, I continued with my lecture. I start with this story because, although the contributors to this workshop have brought up the scientific, forensic and self-referential dimensions of evidence in a variety of media, I miss an explicit engagement with the politics of evidence, outside as well as inside the universities. Continue reading ‘Malinowski’s heirs’ »

1. Professor Hart, could you please begin by telling me a bit about what you are currently working on?

In the last couple of years I have written several articles on money from different points of view. Four essays in press are ‘On money and anthropology: towards a new object, theory and method’, ‘The persuasive power of money’, ‘Money is always personal and impersonal’ and ‘Money in the making of world society’ (the last being the title of my inaugural lecture at Goldsmiths this coming October). I have also given keynote lectures at conferences and written several articles on the informal economy, a concept I contributed to development studies. Continue reading ‘Interview with Patrik Aspers’ »