Keith Hart (anthropologist)

Keith Hart (born 1943 in Manchester, England) is International Director of the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria and lives in Paris with his family. His main research has been on economic anthropology, 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 the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology. He is the author of The Memory Bank (aka Money in an Unequal World). One personal obsession has been the relationship between movement and identity in the transition from national to world society. But his written work focuses on the apparent impasse between the national limits of politics and the fact that the economy is now global.

In 1993, Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw started a small press called Prickly Pear. 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 Engelke, with Marshall Sahlins as publisher. In 2004, Justin Shaffner scanned the original Prickly Pear pamphlets into a PDF format and made them freely available for distribution on the Internet on Keith Hart's website, The Memory Bank.

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.

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