A Spirit of Learning, a Life of Uncertainty: Pushing Out Anthropology’s Frontiers, by Mallika Shakya
Good afternoon [1]. I would like to welcome you all to South Asian University in Delhi, a relatively young university running since 2011 as an inter-governmental collaboration among the eight South Asian nations. Since so many of our present and past students are here, let me begin with what I think is the central voice in this book. Keith writes about himself as a young boy, obsessed with getting into Cambridge University and learning how to be a skilled examination-passer. Later he saw that the attraction of that citadel of scholarship was not its spires and rituals, but a spirit of learning that is abstract and invisible. The spirit of that young boy reverberates in this book.
Keith remained true to the pursuit of knowledge throughout the ebbs and flows of his life, choosing to move between many academic establishments. All of them benefited greatly from his presence; but, except for 15 years teaching at Cambridge in mid-life, he never set his anchor anywhere else. Instead, he embraced a life of uncertainty. It is thanks to this precarious living for several decades that he could give us theories that pushed the frontiers of anthropology into fields such as Africa, informality, money, and human economy, to name a few.
I met Keith in 2005 while attending a World Bank panel on informality in Washington DC. He spoke after a consultant from McKinsey & Company claimed that only 65 per cent of value added tax (VAT) was collected in Turkey, largely because a large informal economy paid poorly. If collection could be increased to 90 per cent, VAT could be reduced by five per cent, to the benefit of foreign corporations who currently paid most of it. Keith can be combative, but now he gave a calm, scholarly response, explaining how he conceived of informality as a subaltern refusal to be confined by unfair regulations, thereby expressing a human spirit of resilience. The privileged few have long treated the common people at best with suspicion and at worst as criminals. Maybe we should all say this; but it is hard to walk the talk. I knew that Keith took that difficult call, and more important, that his life offered an example for all of us that we can refuse complicity with oppression.
On the book cover, Sherry Ortner is spot on to remind us of Keith’s “unorthodox academic career”. This liberated him from the normal pieties and defy the norms of academic anthropology. In this book, he turns his own life into the “field”. There he offers a radical method that embraces anarchy and chaos while finding a writing voice that is meticulously rigorous and lyrical.
I read it while sunbathing on a monastic beach of the river Ganga. I felt the contrast between Keith’s attempt to place himself in the world and an anthropology that has not yet shaken off its professional claim to be the “scientific ethnography” of others, while suppressing most references to the self. The “field” does not have to be distant and apart; it is increasingly enmeshed in the world that each of us makes for ourselves. Moreover, anthropology can and should be about the oneness of humanity, rather than trapped in a narrow focus on its local divisions.
Keith has not read Rabindranath Tagore’s Home and the World (1914), but his classic novella The Broken Nest (1901) brought to my mind Charu and Amal. They learned about themselves and others in a complex relationship that combined rebellion with desire. Amal interrogated his own writing voice and his rival’s. He contrasted a self-referential public autobiography with a memoir meant to establish a personal connection between the author and his readers.
Keith is surely in the second camp. He takes inspiration for his authorial voice from popular culture, evoking especially the rock singer, Tom Petty, “leader of the Heartbreakers [who] died of a broken heart” while he was writing his book. Their affinity lies in his having been “a music fan as much as he was a musician, aware that the style that had made him successful was based at least in part on borrowing and paying homage, synthesizing the sound of artists he loved into something entirely his own.” Tom Petty fought the corporate private property system and won twice, a fight that Keith identifies with.
Keith claims to have learned most from C.L.R. James and M.K. Gandhi, while his writing is rooted in the pioneering anthropology of Immanuel Kant and Marcel Mauss. Montaigne, Nabokov, and Achebe are among his precursors in writing the self. He recognizes Rousseau’s audacity in his Confessions (Rousseau 1982) where he sets out to reveal himself as “concealing no crimes and adding no virtues”. Keith never loses sight of this duality:
“We each have a big voice and a little voice. The first tells us that we are a hero, star, genius; and the second says, you’re a fraud and they will soon find you out. This second voice keeps us sane, but without the first we would never attempt great things” (Hart 2022: 18).
I have shared much with Keith over the years. What impresses me is his search for meaning where order and chaos, intimacy and grandeur meet, and of course “self in the world”. He asks, “How do we bridge the gap between a puny self and a vast unknowable universe?” Keith finds in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An autobiography revisited (1951) an echo of what he has written himself here: “We need to scale the world down and scale up the self, so that the two can meet meaningfully. This is not just about individuals and society, but the time and space coordinates we find ourselves in – bridging the big and little things that make up our lives. Ritual and prayer once connected people to an object world personified as God. Works of fiction – plays, novels, movies – now perform a similar role. The world or history is reduced in scale to a stage, paperback, or screen, allowing each of us to enter it subjectively on our own terms (Hart 2022: 25-26).
This heterodoxy makes the book unique. After my long exposure to Keith’s teacherly nudging and self-deprecating jokes, I now realize that there is a scholarly ancestry for a particular sense of humor and irony that is Keith’s, where the wise scholar allows us access to the exam-passing young boy who would catch the stars. This brilliant move allows him to insert himself meticulously into the theories that he cites while mapping out the high- and low-brow knowledge he has acquired in a nomadic life whose main principle is learning.
I have often shared this with my students — what makes us scholars is shared as much when chatting over beer and coffee as in printed books and formal lectures. We should never forget, however, how learning differs between world-class universities and schools like this one. Our provenance is precarious; we are only a decade old, full of ambition and energy; but short on vital resources. Our students can only read the best-known books without being able to see their intellectual models as flawed human beings. Keith did us all a great service by writing up the pub chat as scholarship.
A Tolstoian Approach to Tackling Contingency, by Arjun Appadurai
Thank you, Mallika [2]. You have organized a marvelous event because the person at the center of it, my dear old friend Keith Hart, is himself something of a marvel. He never fails to bring his remarkable energies to all his ventures, relations, and travels, to his students, colleagues, and friends – all categories not new or strange to Keith.
I have some things to say about what Keith has accomplished in this wonderful book. I will not dwell on the specifics, although it is very well-written and detailed, but offer some general thoughts. All readers of the book will know what I am referring to. First, Self in the World, from the beginning to the end, is remarkably generous – to other people and other places that he is familiar with and to other times and ways of looking at the world that are not his own. This generosity is not just about being nice; it allows him to engage with an enormous diversity of places, histories, disciplines, and approaches. That struck me time and again when reading the book. Next, I want to say a couple of things more, in the short time available to me, about what I think Keith was trying to do and in fact did in writing this amazing book.
First, his stories – because I think of it in that way – do what the best anthropological studies of ritual do. Not the routine studies of ritual, but the best of them illuminate their social context. They use ritual as a kind of flash- or spotlight to illuminate the wider environment. Likewise, Keith’s remarkable life encounters throw light on the world he traverses. I will say more about that world in a moment. The great gift of the book is that it keeps moving across the author’s various terrains. Through the events of his experience – the alchemy is mysterious – we encounter contexts, places, institutions, and people that somehow come alive and are more understandable than they might otherwise have been.
The other way I see the stories that Keith has told here concerns what the world is he moves in and how. Here what struck me most about the many vivid details – the book is a kind of Tolstoian exercise – is that they can lead you to forget the big arc – the many arcs running through the book that he has so beautifully captured. These reveal Keith’s inspired mode of thinking and conceptualizing his own stories and his chosen discipline, anthropology.
His spatial movement takes him from a childhood in Manchester via Cambridge on journeys to Africa, America, the Caribbean and now to Europe and Africa again – through the North Atlantic quadrilateral formed by the slave trade which he identifies as his life situation. These spatial movements, as portrayed in the book, somehow – I say “somehow” because it is quite magical – also become windows on temporal scales, from the smallest and most immediate to the biggest and most global.
Keith brings three things together in a rare combination. One is his own life that he set out at first to assemble in an autobiography. He could have done a decent job by cutting and pasting passages that dealt only with this. But he does not do that. Two other things are going on all the time. His journey goes all the way back to the grand matters of evolution, of our history as a species, of agriculture, cities, and the state, which he knows better than almost any living anthropologist. That scale is constantly in tension with the scale of the local.
We read in highly specific detail of him watching cricket somewhere in England or watching movies with his daughter. Just when you think, Aha! Now we are going to hear about his family life, Keith is off again (boom!) chasing some very large-scale questions. This is not done artificially. I am trying to capture here that Keith repeatedly – not just once, with an obvious beginning, middle and end – takes off from some concrete details of his life and existential journey and zooms into a remarkable scale of time and space. Then, just when you think that you are going to get the big Hegelian picture, he zooms down to somewhere equally specific, leaving you unsure what the big story is. Then he takes off again… and does this often.
The book is written in such beautiful prose, highly accessible short sentences, an editor’s dream and therefore a reader’s delight. There are very many big ideas about which Keith has written at length here: to name a few, money, migration, connection, revolution, race and the internet. These are just six of the 10-15 big things that he tackles – I am groping for metaphors – like Mohammed Ali, he floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee. Then he is off again. There is no dwelling or trying to hold all things in place for a while. Each of these massive topics is illuminated by his erudition, his range and not least his wit.
Most important, when thinking about this book today after reading it for the last few weeks, is Keith’s alertness to contingency in his own tumultuous life. This is evident from the first page to the last. The world in all its complexity, about which Keith has written a great deal elsewhere, takes on the qualities of a story, not a theory or system which he could easily do in other circumstances. He does not give into that. Keith asks himself: What question is this book the answer to? For me, the closest I could get to answering it is this. In a world that is intrinsically contingent, where necessity is only an illusion we have of the past, how can we resist the temptation to hold it still and take a photograph of it? Keith refuses to do that. This refusal is a great lesson for me and, I imagine, for everyone in our field and the fields nearby.
A Teacher Who Brings Everything Together and Makes It Come Alive, by Yasmin Arif
When Mallika asked me to speak on Keith’s book, [3] I was hesitant since I do not think I have the wisdom of Arjun or the experience of Supriya. In a library of extraordinary books, this one would stand out. Its philosophy is expressed mainly in the style of its writing – every sentence is made up of few words; each paragraph might be followed by another that has very little connection to the first. Yet they all come together in a neat, illogical sequence of an unplanned journey that was always guided by a singular aspiration. He says somewhere at the beginning that this book is partly autoethnographic – not a typical autobiography, but more the story to date of a man who has led an encyclopedic life, whose mind can barely be put together between the covers of a conventional book. As he says in jest, “My brain’s so fast, coffee slows me down. I stay off drugs other than booze because my brain is mind-bending enough already” (Hart 2022:155).
This gives a sense of what this book will turn out to be. It is quite possible that people lead lives like his, but they seldom write books like it. It will not take long to read the table of contents to see how he has laid it out. I started reading it only four days ago and put it down last night. It is typical to describe a book as a rollercoaster when it takes readers through a lifetime of ups and downs, the ordinary and the extraordinary. But this one is a ride where we need to keep an eye not just on the alarming curves, but on the expressions of the passengers’ faces as we speed from sheer horror to extreme delight, often interspersed with tears that we do not know we are shedding.
The momentum takes us through childhood and his family of origin to his daughters, his peers, his mentors, his losses in illness and death. Innumerable anecdotes accumulate of a life spread over cities, slums and universities, across Manchester and Cambridge, Ghana, Geneva, Paris, Durban, Chicago, Detroit and back to Paris. In the introduction he even tells you how to read the book. Some parts should be read in sequence, others not. But for me it felt that I was listening to him… maybe in a classroom, over dinner or a drink. There were classes that I would have liked to attend, for example on his major literary influences – Montaigne, Rousseau, Gibbon, Nabokov and Achebe – or on his chosen predecessors in anthropology that I would have eagerly agreed with – especially Vico, Rousseau again and Kant’s views on world anthropology. He writes about Fanon, C.L.R. James, Du Bois and Gandhi, who have influenced his understanding of colonized selves and worlds. Each is meant to teach us, not through the burden of ponderous scholarship, but with a crystal clear and deeply personal understanding of how each book, each moment in life led to another towards the economics of humanity in a consistent and persistent path. Before I come to that, I want to share how this brilliant mix of personal and pedagogic styles comes together:
My favorite anthropology teacher as an undergraduate was Audrey Richards. She came from an old colonial family and was very distinguished. She encouraged me to study cities in Africa and once granted me a personal tutorial. When I got married, she gave us a jam thermometer – “every marriage needs a little sweetness”. She told my wife, “If you see something you really like, buy four of them”. We had no money at the time. For the tutorial she asked me to write an essay which I then had to read out (this was Cambridge). She interrupted me a lot and kept asking for less abstraction, more detail. I had to write it again. I decided to write the most pedestrian piece I could. After reading it out, Audrey said, “Now that we know you can walk, Mr. Hart, we can discuss your aspiration to fly”. Tough love always goes straight to my heart (Hart 2022: xi-xii).
This is a paragraph familiar in academic autobiographies; but we do not expect it to be followed by this one immediately:
I dedicate this book to Friedrich Engels, as well as to my daughters and aunt, because I finished it in his bicentenary year. He wrote a book on Manchester (Engels 1845) in his mid-twenties, gave Karl Marx first-hand knowledge of the industrial working class, co-wrote the German Ideology and Communist Manifesto (both Marx and Engels 1848), tolerated Marx’s defects, built him up as supreme leader and kept the movement going after his death (Engels 1880). He enjoyed his wealth as the scion of a German transnational firm…and considered marriage a bourgeois institution. He lived in Manchester faithfully with Mary Burns and, after her death, her sister Lizzie, both illiterate Irish working-class women with radical political views (McCrea 2015). Engels’ reworking of L.H. Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) became a lynchpin of modern feminism in the 1960s and 70s (Engels 1884).
This is a teacher who brings everything together in a classroom and makes it come alive. Next another paragraph that might be my favorite:
I stood on a street corner in Chicago, with the wind whistling up my arse. It felt that there was no-one in a thousand miles who knew or cared much for me. Despite the disasters, I had found liberty in America. I had a chance to spread my wings. The idea of freedom runs deep in the United States and is synonymous with movement. I would never have grasped the meaning and sources of “freedom” if I had stayed in the Old World, where the past weighs so heavily. Conformity is the complement of American freedom. Culture builds ties that a fragmented society cannot. I embraced aspects of the common life, especially sports. But I didn’t know what made those strange people tick or how I could become one of them (Hart 2022:117).
I met Keith only once – when he came to speak at the sociology department in Delhi University in the mid-2010s. Afterwards, we shared a car ride for an hour when I learnt his most enduring formulation – that money, markets and humanity can be spoken of in the same sentence. It put to rest my struggles in trying to bridge the distance between the academic ideological silos keeping things apart that need to be connected. I remember us agreeing with Keynes that money like blood needs to circulate to keep society alive. Keith has pursued and made sense of this simple and powerful idea of the economy as a function that can and must lie outside institutions. We know the informal economy as his original contribution – weaving the fabric of a sustained life, sometimes illegally, but always dialectically with and against bureaucracy and politics. Yet, I would underline that he brings to the front stage an anthropology that is always about making sense of the world, of humanity and how each of us lives in it as people in particular contexts.
Keith has studied this economy of life through the history of imperialism, colonialism, and development regimes, as well as in Africa’s markets and slums, in racetracks and betting shops, in criminal networks of give and take, in the corridors of many departments and universities, in policy documents and international bank agendas and, in good measure, the lyrics of his favorite singers. In a world that is now beset with boundaries and exclusions, to see the potential of unifying rather than fragmenting themes is a relief. As Cornel West said recently, with all the wokeness we see around us now (I would add often encouraged by anthropologists), we are all likely to become insomniacs. I will end with Keith’s words that help put to rest that relentless insomnia, fueled by false solidarities, bringing home the importance of living a singular life sustained by planetary thought.
We embark on two life journeys – one out into the world, the other inward to the self. Society is mysterious to us because it dwells inside us, mostly inaccessible to thought. Writing brings the two into a mutual understanding that we can share with others. Living in society may become exposed to introspection in this way. Fragments of experience could then be combined into a whole, a world as singular as the self. There are as many worlds as individual journeys. If there is only one world out there, each of us changes it whenever we move (Hart 2022:1).
Thank you, Keith. I hope that one day I may write a small book inspired by this one.
“Money Helps Us Learn How to Be More Fully Human”, by Supriya Singh
I first met Keith in Pretoria after reading him for years [4]. One of the stories he told me then was how he had financed the luxuries of an academic life through betting. That little nugget stayed with me because I did not tell him that I was married to a man who lost heavily as a gambler. I had never met anyone who talked of betting as a positive influence in his life. It was good to flesh out Keith’s story by reading this book because that evening only gave me a glimpse of his life.
Anthropologists tell stories about others, but they seldom place themselves in the context of their own life. It was wonderful for Keith to do just that. As Yasmeen and Arjun put it very well, it is an absolute gift to have an anthropologist who can write, since most of them put you to sleep. They have wonderful things to write about, but they use long, convoluted sentences and you cannot tell what they want to say. As Keith points out, he writes as he talks and talks as he writes. Thank you so much for that. Telling your own story and not just other people’s is a gift. Keith asks every reader to take just what they want from his book, depending on their own situation. That is my plan too.
I read of your growing up as if it were exotic anthropology – Manchester, football, classics. I grew up in Delhi in a refugee family. At school we read about daffodils, and I have never seen one in my life. I studied in a convent. I was delighted to happen on Tagore. I did not know Sanskrit, had a bit of Hindi and did not have Punjabi. Basham’s The Wonder That Was India was our bible. My framework was formed by English literature’s view of India and by my father’s version of Sikhism as a very humane and egalitarian religion. I took that outlook with me to read sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. Professor Srinivas put us right, I remember, by telling us that Sikhism too has a barber caste. I learned there to interrogate all the ideologies that people throw at you.
For me, the most riveting part of your story was the raw account of your mental illness. Again, that connects with my life because our family knows bipolar disorder well. But the people in my life who experienced it – my father and two late sisters – suffered from it, but never talked about their illness. I was of course terrified that I would get it; and I have read a lot about it. One sister recognized its presence in her, but I never found out from her what the experience was like. I was amazed that you remember so much of your long immersion in that bipolar illness. I thought that people usually blank it all out. The most amazing part is that you were bipolar and on lithium, yet you managed to lead a professional and creative life. Yes, your middle years were quiet and silent, but the decades before and after were very productive. It was quite a discovery for me that it could be like that; it does not always descend into mediocrity.
As Yasmeen put it, there is always a dialectic between the personal, the academic and the philosophical in writing and speech. What took my breath away was when you suggested an intimate link between kinship and slavery in West Africa. I have been studying domestic abuse and economic exploitation for the last few years. Women have told me that they felt they were a slave in their family. That is always there and never spoken of. Most of us, me included, see the flow of money remittances as a “currency of care”. But the stories I heard made me see them also as possibly a source of abuse. Sociologists and anthropologists are capable of writing and speaking abstractly about control and power; but they seldom refer to coercion and abuse in the home. Yet maltreatment of the elderly and violence against women and children are commonplace there.
Reflecting on these personal connections gives me great pleasure. Keith has always been open about the blessings and pains of his life. Literature often takes us further along these lines. Keith, you wrote that you cried for your own inadequacy as a writer when you read Chinua Achebe in the field. It made me wish I had read Chinua Achebe in the Delhi School of Economics, instead of about African kinship. You write about both and tell stories that illustrate your advocacy for making a better world – all in real life. That is something more of us must do. I know that after studying domestic economic abuse, I am no longer satisfied with just writing for academic journals; few people read them and the people I want to get through to certainly do not. I now spend most of my time making presentations across the country (both in Australia and abroad) telling what we should do and how we should talk about money.
This is how I connect with Keith’s work on money (Hart 2000). He says that it is capable not only of making the world more personal, but of making the impersonal dimensions of life in society more knowingly part of our intimate selves. Together with language, but more so, it is a universal means of communication, perhaps the most potent. Money is not only a currency of care or of abuse. As Keith says in this book, money helps us learn how to be more fully human (Hart 2022: Chapter 19). I found all the above strands there. The writing is simple, raw, and deeply personal, yet also globally human. Connecting life’s extremes is the most important issue of our times. For having woven these threads together, I thank you, Keith.
[1] Mallika Shakya teaches sociology and anthropology in South Asian University. She focuses on how industrialization and development are socially embedded. Before this, she worked for the World Bank and UNICEF in Asia, Africa and Europe. Her recent books are Death of an Industry: The cultural politics of garment manufacturing during the Maoist Revolution in Nepal (Shakya 2018) and a collection, Poetic Imagining(s) in South Asia (Shakya 2022).
[2] Arjun Appadurai is distinguished visiting professor at the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He is also emeritus professor in media, culture and communication at New York University. His most recent book is Failure (Appadurai and Alexander, 2019). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
[3] Yasmeen Arif is professor of sociology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi. She is writing a critique of identity in politics following Life, Emergent: The Social in the Afterlives of Violence (Arif 2016). Her book, Life per se: The Government of Identity (in preparation), explores minority identities in contemporary democracies. She also researches and writes on knowledge production in geopolitics.
[4] Supriya Singh is honorary professor at the Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She is a writer and sociologist. Supriya was born in India and moved to Malaysia when she got married. She migrated to Australia in 1986. She has homes in Melbourne and Dharamshala. She has two sons and three grandsons. Her most recent book is Domestic Economic Abuse: The Violence of Money (2021).