The Memory Bank

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’ »

Economic anthropology is the product of a juxtaposition of two academic disciplines in the twentieth century. It would be wrong to speak of the relationship between economics and anthropology as a dialogue. From the beginning, economists in the ‘neo-classical’ tradition have rarely expressed any interest in anthropology and none at all during the last half-century, when their discipline has become the dominant ideological and practical arm of global capitalism. Anthropologists, on the other hand, when they have been concerned with ‘the economy’, have usually felt obliged to address the perspective of mainstream economists, sometimes applying their ideas and methods to exotic societies, more often being critical of the discipline’s claim to be universally valid. Since anthropologists in this period based their intellectual authority on the fieldwork method, discourse in economic anthropology has generally been preoccupied with the interpretation of economic ideas in the light of ethnographic findings. But civilization is often thought of as an economy these days; and some anthropologists, drawing on a variety of theories and methods, have offered alternative visions of the economy’s past, present and future. Continue reading ‘A short history of economic anthropology’ »

Extract from a recent exchange with David Graeber about an “anti-capitalist” conference on money.

 
KH: Just in case I never made it explicit, my resistance to the term anti-capitalist is as follows. First, it seems to me that capitalism has not yet fulfilled its historic task of bringing cheap commodities to the masses and undermining the insularity of traditional communities (when a third of humanity work with their hands in the fields and have never made a phone call in their lives). Second, when the grip of America and Europe over world economy is being loosened by a genuine globalization of capital accumulation in places like India, China, Brazil and Russia for the first time, anti-capitalism could be just the defense of white privilege in drag. Third, If Locke and Marx envisaged capitalism as a transitional phase between landed reaction and a future just society, we have to figure out where we are in that process and I think not all that far. Premature anti-capitalism leads to some nasty versions of social control. Fourth, for many parts of the world, such as Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, people languish under varieties of the Old Regime and are ripe for a liberal revolution. This to my mind usually involves some fractions of capital as well as progressive popular movements. Fifth, I never yet heard of a popular social movement with the capacity to launch communications satellites or to run a modern health service. So sixth, I would not wish to be against all capitalist firms. Some could be useful to a progressive movement (Red Hat Linux, HP’s 4 billion poorest initiative), while others are only concerned with developing neo-feudal monopoly (Microsoft, Halliburton). A lot of it has to do with timing. It's just that, after living through the last 60-odd years, I don’t get on particularly well with a bunch of rich white boys sounding off about being anti-capitalist. Individuals are a different case.

Continue reading ‘anti-capitalism’ »

The mystery of money

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

(John Kenneth Galbraith)

Ours is an age of money. If human society has any unity at this time it is as a world ‘market’. There is nothing wrong with people exchanging goods and services as equals. Markets are indispensable to the extension of society. The problem is that they use money: some people have lots of it and most don’t have enough. Money marks social relations in capitalist societies. We think it makes a huge difference if a transaction involves payment or not. But we don’t ask why this should be so, even less where the power of money comes from. With the exception of a few whistle-blowers like Galbraith (1975), the economists prefer to keep us mystified; the media and the schools do little to enlighten us either. So we are sustained in our ignorance by vague beliefs and assailed by a mass of trivial facts, being left to build up our personal defenses against an impersonal system we regard as inevitable. Continue reading ‘Money: towards a pragmatic economic anthropology’ »

The term ‘informal sector’ (later ‘informal economy’ and now often just ‘informality’) arose almost four decades ago to describe the unregulated activities of the Third World urban poor. But the problem of proliferating urban masses, supporting themselves in invisible ways and at some perceived risk to public safety, is an older one.

Continue reading ‘The urban informal economy in retrospect’ »

Je dois d’abord rappeler que la France ne vit ni en vase clos ni dans un monde immobile. Nous devons prendre conscience que nous vivons une communauté de destin planétaire, face aux menaces globales qu’apportent la prolifération des armes nucléaires, le déchaînement des conflits ethnico-religieux, la dégradation de la biosphère, le cours ambivalent d’une économie mondiale incontrôlée, la tyrannie de l’argent, l’union d’une barbarie venue du fond des âges et de la barbarie glacée du calcul technique et économique. Le système planétaire est condamné à la mort ou à la transformation. Notre époque de changement est devenue un changement d’époque.

Edgar Morin, Si j’avais été candidat…, Le Monde, 24^th April 2007

I explore here the formation of ‘world society’ in our time and the relationship of money to this process. Clearly, as ‘capitalism’, money is both a creative and an oppressive force driving globalization. I believe that money and markets are indispensable to the extension of society, even if their contemporary form often conflicts with humanity’s common interests. My main precedessors are Kant, Durkheim and Mauss, from whom I draw what might be understood as an ‘anthropology’. After an ‘Introduction’, I first consider the rupture between self and society that resulted from modern society’s reliance on impersonal institutions and the conditions for restoring a measure of unity to that relationship – to live as a whole person in harmony with society. Then I examine why ours is a special moment in the history of world society. As the first generation for whom world society is a fact, we are equipped with the means to study it and are indeed obliged to do so, if we can overcome the myopia of nationalism. Next, I present my principal conclusions on money. Money was a human universal long before its current apotheosis as the ‘money markets’. Although capitalism generates economic inequality and injustice worldwide, its historical mission to produce cheap commodities and to break down the insularity of traditional communities still has a long way to go. We must nevertheless explore the possibilities for economic democracy today; and I conclude with some brief reflections on method inspired by Mauss. Continue reading ‘Money in the making of world society 1’ »

 Revised version of 'A liberal revolution for Africa?' below. 

From Pan-Africanism to national capitalism

I consider here Africa’s development prospects in the coming half-century, viewed in the light of the century that has just passed. Africa has seen extraordinary urban growth in the twentieth century and this, rather than the conventional view of the continent as a rural exporter of raw materials, should form the basis for thinking about development in future. This means exploring ways of linking present forms of urban commerce to the world economy, as well as to national and regional markets. Indigenous commerce has so far been approached mainly in terms of the ‘informal economy’. The concept tells us what these activities are not – not regulated by law and public bureaucracy – but little about what they positively are. This has led me to ask what social forms organize the informal economy and mobilize its resources, since they must surely play a significant part in whatever happens next.

What prospects do neo-liberal markets hold for the African continent as a whole? Could Africa sustain a liberal revolution of its own — sooner rather than later? What might be the social and cultural conditions for this? Africa’s experience in the twentieth century is often represented as a failure to ‘develop’. This perception obscures what actually happened, a development of extraordinary scale and speed that I call Africa’s ‘urban revolution’. If there is to be an African liberal revolution in the next half-century, it will be fed by social forces that have already taken root in the century that has just passed. Continue reading ‘The African Revolution: development in the 21st century world’ »

Durkheim assembled a team to promote his vision for sociology, but he and Mauss were a double act like Marx and Engels. There was room for only one leader of the movement, so we speak of the Durkheimians and the Marxists. Mauss and Engels each assumed leadership of the movement they jointly founded after their partner’s death, but the intrinsic inequality of the partnership was made worse in Mauss’s case by age difference, kinship seniority and his inability to write books of his own. The publication of an abridged English translation of Marcel Fournier’s Marcel Mauss: a biography allows us to reconsider his historical relationship with Durkheim, as well as his legacy for anthropology, history and the social sciences today. French scholarship on Mauss is, of course, much more advanced than its Anglophone counterpart and it is less confined to academic anthropology. Fournier’s 800-page collection of Mauss’s Écrits politiques remains virtually unknown to English-speakers and the collective organized in his name, the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales (with its journal, revue du MAUSS), continues the eponymous founder’s commitment to integrating progressive politics and intellectual work over a wide range of issues. In both cases, The Gift has iconic significance as Mauss’s most discussed work; but, as Sigaud has already pointed out, the Anglophone academy, with assistance from one or two leading French anthropologists, has taken up its message in ways that depart seriously from the author’s original intentions.

Continue reading ‘Marcel Mauss: our guide to the future’ »

(Public lecture, 'The African Revolution: urban commerce and the informal economy', given at the University of Ghana in Accra, 8^th January 2007)

I spent over two years, 1965-68, living mainly in an Accra slum area, Nima 441. Not long afterwards and drawing on that research, I was credited with being the source of the ‘informal economy’ concept (Hart 1973, 2006). But the real sources of the idea were the mostly poor Ghanaians who took in a young English student and allowed me to share something of their lives. Everything I have done since has been inspired by that formative period spent here in Ghana. In what follows, I will not dwell at length on the informal economy concept as such or on the experience that gave rise to it.Rather, I will take advantage of the seminar series’ invitation to consider the next fifty years in this jubilee year of Ghana’s independence. If the ‘informal economy’ concept drew attention to a wide variety of hitherto invisible practices, at this stage we need to investigate more closely what these practices stand for positively. I will argue that they constitute a dramatic expansion of urban commerce, ‘the market’, which just might be the foundation for an economic revolution in Africa during the decades that lie ahead. Continue reading ‘A liberal revolution for Africa?’ »