Remembering Professor Keith Hart

Colleagues in Anthropology have been remembering Professor Keith Hart, who recently passed away. Professor Emerita Frances Pine shares her reflections.

It is with great sadness that we share the news of Professor Keith Hart's death, in Paris, on November the 6th. Widely viewed as one of the most brilliant economic anthropologists of his generation, and a highly original and creative political economy theorist, Keith was also a charismatic speaker, mentor and teacher, who inspired both students and colleagues during his years in the Anthropology Department of Goldsmiths (2004-2008) and elsewhere. 

John Keith Hart was born in Trafford Park in 1943. Keith was proud of his working class roots and identified strongly as "Manchester Man". He won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, and went on to study Classics and History at St John's College, Cambridge. Staying on in Cambridge to do a PhD in Anthropology, he did fieldwork in Ghana, focussing on migration and what he was to label "the informal economy", which remained central threads through all of his work. After completing his PhD (1969), Keith went on to teaching posts at the University of East Anglia and Manchester University; from 1976-82 he held lectureships in North America, including at Yale, Chicago, Michigan and McGill. Keith returned to the UK in 1982, to the Cambridge Anthropology Department, from 1982-98; he was also the Director of the African Studies Centre in Cambridge between 1992 -98. Keith then joined the Centre for Rural Development in Aberdeen (1999-2003). He moved to the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths in 2004, receiving a Professorship in 2006.

From 1997 Keith made Paris his main home with his wife, the anthropologist Sophie Chevalier, while continuing to lecture, speak and write in the UK, the US and, increasingly, South Africa. He and Sophie spent long periods living and carrying out research in Durban and Pretoria; Keith held a position at the University of Kwazulu Natal from 2008-2013 and was co-director of the Human Programme in Pretoria from 2011-2018. 

Keith's academic research was wide ranging. Initially best known for his work on the 'informal economy", which he first introduced in the groundbreaking article "Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana" (1973), he went on (with Anna Grimshaw), to write about C.L.R. James and to establish the Prickly Pear Press, modelled on early radical printers' essay pamphlets. His books included The Political Economy of West African Agriculture (1982), The Memory Bank: money in an unequal world (2000) and his autobiographical Self in the World: connecting life's extremes (2022). He also co-wrote and co-edited a number of volumes, including with Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cantanni, The Human Economy: a citizen's guide (2010) and with Chris Hann, Market and Economy: the Great transformation today (2009), and Economic Anthropology: history, ethnography, critique (2011). 

Keith's work was always grounded in history and political philosophy; he loved Rousseau, Marx and Montaigne. Characteristically, he engaged with the intellectual history of social science as passionately as he imagined new and radical futures. Underpinning and driving all of his research, writing and teaching was a deep commitment to public academic engagement, a critical focus on inequality (local and global), economic development and money in an unequal world and a strong belief in the possibility of a human (and humane) economy. His networks extended world-wide, embodied in his blog and his ubiquitous on-line presence. 

Above all, Keith was a highly social human being. He could be complicated, and prickly, but he was also a generous and loyal colleague and friend. Friends with whom he stayed during his travels to North America, throughout Europe and in Africa remember him sitting in his plaid dressing gown at the kitchen table all morning, typing on his laptop and engaging in dialogue on endless topics that caught his fancy. His love of intellectual and academic collaboration was obvious in every aspect of his life. At Goldsmiths, he inspired and challenged undergraduates, and gave them a window to new and exciting possibilities and imaginaries. To his postgraduate students and his junior colleagues, he was a mentor, willing to take the time to read work critically and to respond positively, with discussion, advice, guidance and enthusiasm as required. His ideas and spirit will live on in the students and young colleagues whom he taught, encouraged and to whom he gave so much, at Goldsmiths and worldwide.