Keith Hart was—is—a towering figure in my life, the person most responsible for the early formation of my sense of what anthropology is and might yet be.

I first met Keith in 1988, when he was in his mid-forties and I was a very callow nineteen, having just “gone up” to Cambridge. I have a clear mental image, even now, of weekly supervisions (which is what we called tutorials) in Keith’s little office at Girton. Low winter light filtering through a leaded glass window, Keith almost swallowed by his armchair, perusing the hand-written essays that, a few days before, we’d gingerly dropped into the box outside his door.

Looking back on that scene now, I have the sense that Keith was often just as perplexed by what the situation generically demanded of him as we were. For us, the perplexity was a symptom of the gap between what our educations up to that point had instilled in us and the expansive, indeed emotional way Keith posed questions. For Keith, I suspect, it had to do with a lingering feeling that the staging of the whole situation was in some sense fraudulent. That in the place where something more vital might happen in the name of education, we were in fact, as he once remarked, being trained to write civil service memos. (Actually, Keith said that more than a decade after I had graduated, by way of response to a review essay that I had just written, and of which I was somewhat proud. That was the other thing: Keith didn’t hold back.)

At one point during our first year at Cambridge, Keith announced to our small supervision group that everything we were doing was pretty much wasted on us, because we had so little experience of life. Far better, he said, if we had all gone out into the world and come to university at twenty-five. Still, here we were. The next three years were not always smooth—Keith was going through a lot—but I never had any doubt that he was absolutely committed to making the best of it: to saving us, his advisees, from relaxing into disciplinary convention and academic complacency. For Keith—and thus for us—scholarship was always, always an existential project, a life in which nothing less than the soul is at stake.

Lest this all get too solemn, I remember the very first “at home” evening that my cohort of Girton anthropologists went to at Keith’s house. All of us were of course desperate for his attention and approval. One of my contemporaries, still today a very dear friend, was earnestly engaging Keith in a tortured conversation about his, my friend’s, Catholic upbringing. I sensed Keith’s eyes glazing over and seized my opportunity. The stereo was pumping out ZZ Top’s Eliminator album (Keith’s choice). Impulsively, I cut in, remarking that the curious thing about ZZ Top is that the drummer’s name is Frank Beard—but he’s the only one who doesn’t have a beard. Keith came alive with a start, slapped his thigh, and exclaimed “Now that’s the kind of conversation I want to be having!” (I know my friend has long since forgiven me.)

As we, Keith’s students, set out on our journey of understanding anthropology as a global project in which human emancipation is always the aim, Keith’s mercurial persona—consciously cultivated, to be sure—kept us hooked. His stories of arriving as an undergraduate in Cambridge as a working-class kid from Manchester on a scholarship, and working out a betting system—which, in his description, required “nerves of steel and friends with deep pockets”—that paid for a champagne-breakfast lifestyle. His reminiscences of “running a criminal enterprise out of an Accra slum” during his fieldwork. Our envy of his regular visits down to London to spend time with the great C. L. R. James, at that point in the last year of his life, for whom Keith’s then-partner Anna Grimshaw was working as an assistant. The time I hand-couriered a stack of C. L. R James’s pamphlets back to Keith from his and Anna’s friend and revolutionary co-conspirator in New York, Jim Murray (whose ancestor, not incidentally, had invented mustard gas).

Keith somehow even managed to weave his life-shattering nervous breakdowns—at Yale, at Chicago, and yes, also during our time at Cambridge—into the picaresque narrative tapestry of a cussed pilgrim’s progress toward a truth that might yet amount to a twenty-first-century version of Kant’s cosmopolitan project of a perpetual peace. There were so many projects, such a dense network of conversations with scholars and activists all over the world. Only a small fraction of them ever emerged in the kind of conventional form that we call “publication.” I smile now as I recall one of these: a literary-philosophical-dramatic script based loosely on Keith’s own life in which the protagonist creates a hedge fund based in Los Angeles and Manchester called LA Mancha…

The scale of Keith’s thinking required that the most fleeting gestures and impulses be connected to world-historical dynamics that spanned thousands of years. As his student, I found this exciting as well as intimidating. Later, I came to see how profoundly unfashionable this way of thinking was in the realm of professional anthropology. A moment comes to me: a talk that Keith gave at the University of Chicago in 2001, when I had only just started working there. Keith was making sweeping gestures with his arms, the better to evoke the millennia across which his story unfolded. I caught a colleague—a friend—trying to catch the eye of someone else in the audience, inviting them into a complicity of rolling eyes and sarcastic smiles. I felt torn: The professionalized part of me, the part of me that had formed in the decade since I had left Cambridge, knew what that look meant. But the other part of me, something older and fiercer, could have challenged them to a duel right then and there.

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that enigmatic relation that we call “charisma,” its promise and its pitfalls. As an undergraduate, I would savor the occasions when Keith would deliver a lecture to the wider Cambridge cohort, and those of us in the know—Keith’s advisees—had the satisfaction of watching others fall under the spell. When Keith was “on,” he was magnificent, holding his audience transfixed by, as it seemed to us, pure improvisation, pacing back and forth across the stage, riffing. By the same token, the spirit could suddenly abandon him. One morning, perhaps fifty or sixty of us were assembled in a lecture theater off Sidgwick Avenue. Keith entered, walked down the aisle, and looked out at us from behind the lectern, oddly ashen. In a small and crumpled voice, he started reading from his notes. After just a few minutes, he looked up and said, simply, “I can’t do this,” walked back up the aisle and out of the room.

I mentioned earlier that Keith somehow managed to give a swashbuckling spin to his mental health struggles. It goes without saying that this was a self-protective tactic. But in a way, I suspect now that for him it also deepened the terrifying isolation of those episodes. His friends and colleagues were often all too ready to play along. When Keith broke down during my last year at Cambridge, he had, as I recall, been thinking a lot about the performative power of ritual: its capacity to bring into being what it enacts. One day during this time, he’d invited some friends over to his home, and they happened to be present as Keith started slipping. One of them narrated the scene shortly after it happened: Keith was moving manically around the house, “creating” everything in it by naming it. “And like true anthropologists,” his friend told me, “we stood around taking notes.” I tell this painful story here (at the time it was related to me with ironic amusement) to suggest something of the cost of Keith’s charisma, even on the other side of psychosis.

Keith was as difficult and as prickly as he was generous and original. During the thirty-five years that have now elapsed since I was formally his student, there were times when I was actively and excitedly in touch with him, times when we read and commented on each other’s writings. And there were times when something intervened, and the silences could extend across years. Losing Keith is for me close to losing a parent. It’s a fundamental unmooring, a loss of orientation. I wish I’d had a chance to speak to him before he went. Travel well, Keith.