‘I’m Prospero Paine, the pamphleteering magician!’

In August 2007, I drove from Long Beach to Marina del Rey for my very first encounter with Keith Hart. He had emailed me, quite out of the blue, letting me know he would be visiting his daughter Louise with his wife Sophie and their daughter Constance, and maybe it was about time we two had a conversation. My review essay on the anthropology of money had appeared in the Annual Review the year before. He wanted to understand what I was going on about.

That essay had occasioned other encounters, too, among them a surprise visit to my office by Scott Mainwaring, then a researcher with Intel Labs, who was beginning to explore the digitization of money. A year later Scott and I would host Keith at UC Irvine to keynote a conference. He threw his prepared remarks on the floor and led us in a veritable teach-in on the collapse of Lehman three days before. “The whole pyramid scheme that is collapsing around our ears at the moment went by the name of the market.”¹

Taking advantage of Intel’s resources, I brought a digital recorder to my meeting and, afterwards, sent it to Intel’s transcription service. Keith had had the idea that we should use the opportunity of our conversation to capture our similarities and differences, and then publish it. After four or five hours of talking, we said our goodbyes.

When I received the transcript, I followed my old ethnographic training: I printed it out, used a pair of scissors to cut it up into pieces, and sorted the pieces into topics, trying to find some order in what had been a ridiculously eclectic discussion ranging from Frankenstein to the personal computer to David Lynch, Raymond Williams, Second Life, a lot of Kant, Spengler, and LETS systems, and what Keith in a later email called “our temperamental differences.”

When I knocked on the door, a voice from inside hollered, “It’s open!” I entered to find a disheveled Keith in the process of pulling up his pants and tucking in his shirt. And so it began. We sat down. I turned on the recorder. Based on the transcript and my memory, there was no real preamble, no niceties to begin with, it was all business, right from the start:

There are quite profound similarities and differences between us. My version of the dialectic is that, if we want the quite significant differences to remain under control, we have to establish a framework of sameness to start with, because I really think that we’re very different in style. So I would like to start by trying to establish how some of the questions that we’re posing are the same or similar, how we came to invest so much in the study of money as anthropologists.²

I am looking at the unpublished transcript: Those were really his exact words!

What were the similarities? We refused to demonize money and markets. We had a deeply ambivalent relationship to Marxism. We saw both the world and thought as malleable, and open to as-yet unacknowledged or unseen possibilities, in part because capitalism makes less visible other socioeconomic or political modalities (Keith: “It’s a Maussian idea that, although capitalism pushes an extreme version of impersonality in exchange, this simply disguises or makes less visible the other elements”).

One subtle difference here: Keith was more willing to be “optimistic,” and “hopeful on the democratization of money.” Keith wanted to recognize money and markets as tools for the extension of human relationships and to use that recognition to imagine new political worlds. I was focused more on where things get stuck. I attributed this to my advisor, Jane Collier, and her ideal-typical analysis of societies as systems of inequality. We came back again and again to Jane Guyer, whose Marginal Gains we were both still trying to absorb (Keith had read it in manuscript form).

Keith felt his optimistic tone “maybe puts off the people I am trying to reach,” “it diminishes the impact of what I say.” Here, Keith’s own self-doubt and insecurity turned into short periods of extreme self-criticism, regret, even anger. He went into a long digression of the time he realized he would never be “the next M. G. or R. T. Smith” after two years of fieldwork in Jamaica (which, incidentally, was another connection between us that I had not realized, our work in the Caribbean). He expressed frustration that I had not included some of his other writings in my review essay on materiality:

Keith: This is not a criticism but I realized that I have published a whole slew of things that feed directly into that. … I wrote an article called commoditization …, and I am thinking, what do I have to do to get it in there.

Bill: Sorry.

Keith: Well, we’re all proprietary, some more than others.

***

Keith: But we can, I mean, do you need some fuel? I have beer.

Bill: That would not be a good idea.

Keith: I can make a ham sandwich.

Bill: Sure, sounds good.

Some of the similarities between us that did not make it into the published version are still a surprise to me to reread almost twenty years later. We both taught statistics, which led to our interest in engaging more seriously with mathematics than many of our other anthropological colleagues, as both something to be attuned to ethnographically, and as a philosophical resource. We both were fans of Star Trek, which, for Keith, opened up his sense of possibility, and for me, helped me think about the notion of the alternative in temporal rather than spatial or epistemological terms (for fans: original series, season 1, episode 27). We both had experiences in Ghana—his far more extensive than mine—but Sophie Chevalier, by his side at his death, afforded me the opportunity to write about it for L’Homme.³ We both had experiences in tax havens, me, through fieldwork, him, through life in Geneva, which gave him insight into a “mafia version of how the economy works, as a kind of taking.” I think that this gave me permission to start taking seriously the fees, tolls, trusts and other payments out of phase with capitalism that can sometimes make capitalism possible but other times very much march to their own beat.

We shared an interest in what he called “collages” as rhetorical strategies for getting our points across, a studied eclecticism with sources and tools. We made fun of the supposed centers of anthropological authority (looking at you, Cambridge and Chicago!). And cooking! You can read the published conversation to learn Keith’s curry technique.

Prospero Paine was Keith’s avatar in Second Life. Prospero, because, he said, he had “always had this sense … that if I could hold all the threads, you know, I could make these people dance my tune.” Indeed, he was preoccupied for the whole time I knew him with the reception of his work in anthropology, and the broader reach he had hoped his work would have (and which, frankly, it did have). Paine, because he saw his writing as part of a project of popular sovereignty, including a popularization of anthropological tools to help build that sovereignty, something we can see in the email discussion list he and Anna Grimshaw founded (the “amateur anthropological association”) and the original instantiation of the Prickly Pear Pamphlet series.

His identification with Prospero may strike readers today as problematic. He arrived at it through his reading of C. L. R. James’s interpretation of Shakespeare (also a little problematic!): “Instead of trying to … illuminate the social order and its historical movement, … [Shakespeare] put the lens on what he [was] doing himself and how he does it.” For Keith, James’s genius was to see Shakespeare not just commenting on the crisis of kingship but enacting it and bringing it into being through his staging and his elicitation of responses from his audience. Theater was a place where publics were constituted as new kinds of political actors. Keith wanted new moneys to create new political actors.

Keith therefore really, truly believed that LETS systems were sites of political education, that the Internet, like money, could foster a new vision of a world society; that, following James, the politics of striving toward a universal liberation was worthwhile, despite liberalism’s dialectic with subordination, racial capitalism, neocolonialism, and environmental destruction. Again, though, this was the hope he wanted to embody, and to him this was nothing more—or less—than the dialectic of self and world, individual and universal. He rediscovered Enlightenment liberal theory as a force for this global project. He marveled of me that I “was somehow formed in a climate that made Deleuze accessible and that [allowed me] to handle the Spinozists on their home ground. And I just can’t get close.” This was a criticism, however, of the kind of monism that would refuse transcendence or liberation. Again, Keith was into the “onward and upward” extension of relationships and human society, whereas I saw the stickiness of prior practice, path dependencies, Guyer’s knots, Collier’s systems of inequality, the impossibility of liberation.

What will we do now, without Keith? I will go back to reading his readings of James, try to figure out why he wanted me to look at Fustel de Coulanges on what everyday peoples of ancient Greece thought about the tyrants, take a look at LETS yet again, maybe give Michael Linton a call, since it was the focus of so much of our discussion that day in August.

But I will leave Keith the last word:

Once, as a joke, when Cambridge University asked me to supply information for their consultancy index, I put myself down as an expert in gambling. When the national lottery was introduced in the early 1990s, I got a pile of inquiries and television slots. They all wanted me to say that a 14-million-to-one chance of winning is so remote that people are stupid to play. My line was that it’s better to have some hope than none at all.