Keith Hart, who died 6 November 2025 in his Paris home, was a brilliant, complicated and inspiring academic and public intellectual with a longstanding connection to Cambridge Anthropology – as student, teacher and colleague.
For Keith the primary task of anthropology was to unsettle certainties, open new horizons and catalyse democratic change. As such, any attempt at capturing his intellectual life and contribution falls short. Here we offer only glimpses that we hope resonate with his many students, colleagues and friends.
His birthplace in Old Trafford, Manchester was, he used to say, where he gained his sentimental education. It was in Manchester Keith learnt to be, as he put it, ‘smart, funny and naughty in unpredictable ways’ (2022:256). Here he also decided at an early age that he was going to Cambridge. Keith was a fighter. With characteristic determination he won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School followed by Classics at St John’s, Cambridge, before switching to Anthropology.
Keith’s PhD, supervised by Jack Goody and Meyer Fortes, explored Frafra migrants’ economic strategies in Accra. Radically at odds with the analytical style of the time, the thesis drew on his own experience as a self-described ‘criminal entrepreneur’ and led to him coining the term ‘informal economy’—the idea for which he became best known. By making the formal/informal contrast explicit Keith aimed to explode the development and economic orthodoxy of the time by showing that so-called unemployed urban Ghanaians were deeply engaged in unrecognised, but nonetheless productive, untaxed economic activity (1972). Keith looked back on the career of this shapeshifter concept, especially its adoption by the very bureaucracies he had critiqued, with a mixture of bemusement and vexation.
Keith never saw himself as an ethnographer, despite ironic references to his style as ‘ethnography from a jet plane’ (e.g. 1982), but he sustained a keen ethnographic eye and sensibility. He was fascinated by form and had an uncanny ability to be at once fully in the moment (of a dinner party, exam board, lecture, conversation or department meeting) and able to step outside and analyse how the form was playing out. It was, a young external examiner observed years later, sometimes disconcerting, always illuminating.
Indeed, no encounter with Keith was ever neutral: ideas sparked, collided, and reformed, and left the ground shifting beneath you, unstable. In Self in the World, he wrote candidly about many decades of struggle with his mental health. There could be bright flashes of exasperation when the significance of the issue at hand slipped past his interlocutor, yet there was always an equal spirit of generosity rooted in knowing how often he had needed to depend on others’ grace.
If Keith was an iconoclast, then, perhaps contrary to his instincts, his enthusiasm also made him an institution-builder. As Director of The African Studies Centre at Cambridge University, he co-edited an important book on Angola (1995) with Joanna Lewis, but also wryly remarked he could never be an academic politician: ‘I’m Mancunian. People can see me coming a mile off!’ ‘Keith has no side’ one of his mentors, Esther Goody, commented. This directness, and his sense of urgency, that what he was talking about really mattered, caught the imagination of generations of students. Keith’s lectures were compelling, memorable, highwire performances, often extemporised, always exquisitely constructed: witty, shifting in a blink from the particular to world history, vivifying social theory with immediate, often autobiographical detail—or a comment drawn from his familiarity with high and lowbrow literature and cinema. He loved American road movies for the freedom they seemed to offer.
Students in the 1980s and ‘90s may recall a lecture on gift exchange concluding with ‘and that is why I never take a bottle of wine to a dinner party!’ (It should be noted that in Keith’s subsequent Paris years, he not only became a connoisseur but took particular pride in selecting appropriate wines as gifts.) Another briefly notorious moment for the same undergraduates was Keith flinging lecture notes in the air shouting ‘the real question is “who am I?”’. The struggle to reveal the past and the future of humanity in one’s autobiographical present was the task par excellence, he argued. However insurmountable, it represented the great challenge in the continuing formation of who we are.
Keith has numerous, enduring intellectual contributions: his chapter ‘On Commoditization’ in Esther Goody’s From Craft to Commodity (1982) should be a mandatory set text for all economic anthropologists; the development of his fascination with money via what he described as his ‘slow burner hit’ article Heads and Tails (1986), to his magnum opus The Memory Bank (2000). In this book, Hart set out his thesis that money was never just a medium of exchange; it was a philosophical object, a cultural artefact, a condensation of memory, and a utopian horizon. Money, which took on a fetishised status in early industrial capitalism, has now, in the digital era, begun to be reabsorbed into social networks and personal identities. Such ‘re-personalisation’ of money has the potential to redeem modernity’s alienations and to afford new kinds of human freedom – so long as the democratic impulse retains the upper hand over totalitarian bureaucracy.
Although firmly within academia, Keith’s zeal for the emancipatory, democratic potential of anthropology being open to all, fuelled his rejection of the mainstream and the boundaries erected by the discipline’s professionalisation (Grimshaw and Hart 1993). While at Cambridge, he championed the emergent social possibilities of the world-wide-web by founding the small-triple-a, or aaa, the amateur anthropological association, cocking a snook at the altogether grander American Anthropological Association. This venture was swiftly followed by the innovative Prickly Pear Pamphlets series with Anna Grimshaw, again aimed at a wide public. ‘We emulate the passionate amateurs of history who circulated new and radical ideas to as wide an audience as possible,’ they wrote. “And we hope in the process to reinvent anthropology as a means of engaging with society.” Next came the still-flourishing Open Anthropology Co-operative.
Beyond these enterprises, Keith sustained a formidably wide range of conversations with young and established scholars around the world, always generous, always making people feel they had something to say. He inspired great affection and loyalty.
His last intellectual project, the human economy, combined the urgent necessities of connecting, synthesising, and moving towards a better, collective, democratic future (2010). In this, Keith followed Marcel Mauss in understanding gifts, money and markets alike as means of human connection. His substack website is called ‘A better world somewhere’; his last poem, ‘Movement is Life’.
Professor Keith Hart is remembered by Professor Catherine Alexander (Durham University) and Dr Huon Wardle (University of St Andrews)
Lead image: Professor Keith Hart at the Audrey Richards Annual Lecture in African Studies, 2014, Cambridge
Grimshaw, Anna and Keith Hart, 1993. Anthropology and the Crisis of the Intellectuals. Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press.
Hart, Keith. 1982. On Commoditization. In From Craft to Commodity: The Ethnography of Proto-Industrial Cloth Production. Ed. Esther Goody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hart, Keith. 1986. Heads and Tails? Two sides of the coin. Man, 21(4): 637-56.
Hart, Keith and Joanna (eds.) Lewis. 1995. Why Angola Matters. James Currey.
Hart, Keith. 2000. The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World. London: Profile Books. (republished in 2001 as Money in an Unequal World: Keith Hart and his Memory Bank by Texere Publishing.)
Hart Keith, Jean-Louis Lavile and David Cattani. 2010. The Human Economy: a citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity
Hart, Keith. 2022. Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes. Oxford: Berghahn Books.