A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
I have opened up a new project to disseminate my work and interests. This link is to the first page. There will be pages on other themes — Africa, networks, current writing, cinema & music etc. My daughter Constance, a young design student, is helping me in this project. I hope you enjoy the display […] →Read more
David Graeber died unexpectedly from a massive haemorrhage of the pancreas in Venice on September 2nd of this year. Obituaries summarize the life of someone who is no longer with us. This is not an obituary in that sense – it is prospective more than retrospective. It is clear that David affected so many people […] →Read more
Compiled for a special part-issue on my work of the Revista Sociologia & Antropologia Rio de Janeiro, 2019. Published books and articles The Memory Bank: money in an unequal world, Profile Books, London, ix, 340p. Re-published 2001 as Money in an Unequal World: Keith Hart and his memory bank, Texere, New York and London, ix, […] →Read more
A betting man’s reflections on money[1] Keith Hart Abstract Part 1 describes my life as a betting man, starting out as a teenager in Manchester and achieving some success as a student at Cambridge. When asked in 2007 why I took up economic anthropology, I replied that I want to save my family from the […] →Read more
The real economy? The challenge of dialectical method[1] Keith Hart[2] Abstract This blatantly introspective essay seeks to trace a path from the postulation of an informal economy as a device of ethnographic realism to participation in virtual reality through the social media. The Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria is the dialectical outcome […] →Read more
Jairus Banaji has posted a beautiful memoir in Facebook showing the linguistic and practical history of Arab mediation between the ancient Greeks and 13th century Venice with reference to a building allocated to German merchants there (the Fontego dei Todeschi). The task of breaking down the imperialist separation of Europe from its African and Asian […] →Read more
In September 2103, Alice Sala and Gregoire Mayor, from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland and on behalf of the multimedia French-language journal ethnographiques.org came to South Africa to film a conference organized by the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria. Afterwards they joined Keith Hart in Durban for three filmed interviews of which […] →Read more
I came across these anecdotal scribbles recently. They were written in the context of September 11th, the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq while I was teaching in the US. I was led by various encounters to reflect on whether American society was descending into fascism. The style is partly historical generalization and […] →Read more
Summary A three-part interview with Keith Hart by Ryan Anderson on Savage Minds Blog Part 1 The Open Access (OA) movement is one of resistance to the privatization of any commons. But its current focus is shaped by the tension between wanting an intellectual commons and accepting, for career purposes, academic preoccupation with private ownership […] →Read more
Talkin’ World War III Blues Bob Dylan One time ago a crazy dream came to me I dreamt I was walkin’ into World War Three I went to the doctor the very next day To see what kinda words he could say He said it was a bad dream I wouldn’t worry ’bout it none, […] →Read more
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
