The true history of British social anthropology’s origins, seen through the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres strait (CAETS) [1] Three centuries of anthropology. Between evolution and ethnography. The CAETS’ protagonists (minus Rivers). The CAETS and functionalist ethnography. Rivers was the founder of British social anthropology. Rivers between anthropology and psychology. →Read more
What anthropologists really do
by Keith Hart
Summary: The new anthropologist is a self-appointed people’s representative in the double sense of writing them up and acting as their advocate. And anthropology is a sort of democratic politics, informed by long-term, empty-headed exposure to strangers wherever they live and shaped by the main public issues of the day. This populism is hostile to […] →Read more
Free trade and protection: not alternatives, but always complementary
by Keith Hart
Sir James Steuart was a Jacobite exile who brought the term ‘political economy’ from Continental Europe to Britain. Almost a decade before The Wealth of Nations he published Principles of Political Economy in 1767. For advocating a free Scottish home market with initial protection from foreign predators, including England (this was 50 years after the Union!), […] →Read more
The Immortal Memory: John Bryden’s Burns Supper Speech, Stockholm 2017
by Keith Hart
My old friend’s speech for January 28th this year. “Burns is one of the reasons I am proud to be a Scot, a socialist, a nationalist, and an internationalist. Burns was all of these things, but much more.” →Read more
Six Poems
by Keith Hart
A selection 1982-1999 Various places Refuge (Paresseux nerveux) A short history of knowledge Ishmael at the masthead (View from a balcony, Jamaica) One glad look Nuclear reaction i can smell the world burning →Read more
Exchange with Alex Foti on nettime
by Keith Hart
Alex Foti to nettime, 17 December 2016 Dear Vahid, for the very little it’s worth i’ve been campaigning to save Aleppo since the siege and furiously since the assad-putin-iran atrocities escalated. i agree about the complicity by omission of the left, which finds a depressing parallel with most of the left muddling truth about ethnic […] →Read more
Trying to make a meaningful connection: Keith Hart’s anthropology
by Keith Hart
Transcription of an interview with Federico Neiburg and Fernando Rabossi held at the National Museum (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), on May 23rd, 2011. It will be published in Portuguese at Revista de Sociologia & Antropologia in 2019. Federico Neiburg (FN): You have your PhD in anthropology from Cambridge, having studied Latin and Greek […] →Read more
After the Paris attacks; a letter to my daughter.
by Keith Hart
After the Paris attacks. A letter to my daughter, Lou Hart. Sophie and Constance are shaken, S more moved by all the calls from kin and friends, poring over images of the carnage, but also thinking of what it means to be gunned down in a bar, asking why people would throw down blankets to […] →Read more
Religion and economy
by Keith Hart
(Delivered on October 22nd in the Economics Faculty, Humboldt University, Berlin as the Hermann Otto Hirschfeld lecture for 2015. With profound thanks to Prof. Rolf Schieder for his role in organizing this event.) Religion belongs to a set of terms that also includes art and science. Science began as a form of knowledge opposed to […] →Read more
Polanyi: prophete de la fin de l’economie liberale (2008)
by Keith Hart
http://interventionseconomiques.revues.org/304 Résumés Français English Interest in the work of Karl Polanyi has increased with the coming of neoliberal globalization and it may still increase given the catastrophies that followed. In his book The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi explained the difficulties encountered by capitalism between the two wars. They resulted in part from the tendency […] →Read more
Welcome
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.