Prof Keith Hart

KEITH HART

BA PhD Social Anthropology (Cambridge)




Keith is currently co-director of the Human Economy Programme, Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He can be contacted at [email protected].

An anthropologist by training, Keith contributed the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has written at length on money, including the collapse of the twentieth century's dominant form, national capitalism. He has taught in more than a dozen universities around the world, especially in Cambridge University where he was Director of the African Studies Centre. He runs an active blog and website at thememorybank.co.uk/ and is a founder and active member of the fast-growing Open Anthropology Cooperative (OAC).  Keith lives in Paris with his family.

Some of Keith's publications include:


Hart, K. and Ortiz, H. 2014. The anthropology of money and finance, Annual Review of Anthropology (Oct).

Hart, K. 2014 Marcel Mauss’s economic vision, 1920-1925: anthropology, politics, journalism, Journal of Classical Sociology 14.1: 34-44.

Hart,K. and Padayachee, V. 2013. A history of South African capitalism in national and global perspective, Transformation 81/82: 55-85.

Hann, C. and Hart, K. 2011. Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique. Cambridge: Polity.

Hart, K., Laville, J. and A.D. Cattani (eds.) 2010. The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide. Cambridge: Polity.

Hart, K. 2009. Money in the making of world society. In C. Hann and K. Hart eds. Market and Society: The Great Transformation today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 91-105. 

Hart, K. 2005. The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or Business, Personal and Impersonal. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.

Hart, K. 2000. The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World. London: Profile; republished in 2001 as Money in an Unequal World. New York: Texere.

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