Keith Hart (anthropologist)

Keith Hart (born 1943 in Manchester, England) is a Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmith's College, University of London. His main research has been on Africa and the African diaspora. He has taught at numerous universities, most significantly at Cambridge where he was director of the African Studies Centre. He has contributed to the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology. He is the author of "Money in an Unequal World". One recurrent theme of his work has been the relationship between movement and identity in the transition from national to world society.

The Memory Bank

[http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/ The Memory Bank] is Keith Hart's digital archive and blog, which was created in 2000 to help publicize his book by the same name. The site includes a near final version of the book, short academic articles written and published in the last decade, and forays into journalism, stories, poetry, and film reviews. It also includes pamphlets produced by Prickly Pear Press in the 1990s, which may be downloaded from the site.

Prickly Pear Pamphlets

In 1993, Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw and started a small press called [http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/press/ Prickly Pear] . Inspired by the eighteenth-century figure of the pamphleteer, their goal was nothing less than to revitalize a stagnant academy. Together, they published a series of ten pamphlets by a range of authors — young, old, unknown, and famous — on a range of topics in anthropology, the history of science, and ethnographic film. "We emulate the passionate amateurs of history who circulated new and radical ideas to as wide an audience as possible," they said. "And we hope in the process to reinvent anthropology as a means of engaging with society." In 1998, Matthew Engelke and Mark Harris took over the press, expanding its operations in the world market and adding a few titles to its list. In 2001, Prickly Paradigm established itself as a new incarnation of Prickly Pear, edited by Matthew, with Marshall Sahlins as publisher.

Principal publications

Books include

*"The Political Economy of West African Agriculture" (1982)
*"The Memory Bank: money in an unequal world" (2000)
*"The Hit Man’s Dilemma: or business, personal and impersonal" (2005)
*"The African Revolution: Africa in the 21st century world" (in preparation)

Articles include

*"Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana" (1973)
*"On commoditization" (1982)
*"Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin" (1986)
*"Kinship, contract and trust: the economic organisation of migrants in an African city slum" (1988)
*"Notes towards an anthropology of the internet "(2004)
*"The political economy of food in an unequal world" (2004)
*"Agrarian civilization and world society "(2006)
*"Marcel Mauss : in pursuit of the whole" (2007)
*"Money is always personal and impersonal" (2007)
*"The persuasive power of money "(2008)
*"Intellectual property" (2008)

External links

* [http://www.thememorybank.co.uk The Memory Bank]