“The hard part is to find the point of entry.” Keith was explaining the predicament of lecturing, as he experienced it. He’d been invited to give a talk at the University of Cape Town, where I was a visiting researcher. The problem, he explained, was knowing where to begin. “Once I get started, the rest just flows.”

“But the talk is about money,” I pointed out.

“It’s the fact that I’ve been talking about it forever that makes it impossible,” he said.

Reflecting on Keith’s life and his contribution to anthropology presents a similar challenge. It’s difficult to find the right beginning. Should I start with the moment I met the man assigned to be my supervisor and he told me of his trajectory from criminal entrepreneur-cum-fieldworker in Ghana to seeing the world from 30,000 feet, as he described it in his characteristically self-deprecating way? Keith was forever looking back dismissively while also searching for a better vantage point, one that synthesized the extremes. Or with the moment he'd read the first draft of my MPhil thesis and informed me, helpfully as it turned out: “Your dissertation is a failure”?

A better option might be Keith’s gift for orality in combination with his singular passion for upholding unlikely arguments. Who else could have turned the notion that amateurs make the best anthropologists into an international movement? What I saw with time, if I didn’t quite grasp it in the moment, was a conviction he held with stubborn consistency: that anthropology was too important to be left as the exclusive domain of academic anthropologists. The amateur, by which he meant something like an inquirer who hadn’t yet been trained out of curiosity, was for him not a deficient version of the professional but rather the source from which any honest professional draws. The position may have read as provocation, eccentricity, or breach of professional decorum, but it is a thought worth considering now, when departments are closing and ethnographic attention seems to flourish in more places outside the discipline than within it.

As students, we sometimes sought to assert the limits to our willing suspension of disbelief. Take the day he informed our economic anthropology class that soon ordinary people would be inventing their own currencies. It was the early 1990s, and the knowing glances we exchanged barely obscured what we had to inwardly admit was Keith’s talent for getting there so much faster. What none of us could have anticipated is that he would be vindicated and inverted in the same gesture. Peer-to-peer money arrived in no time; ordinary people really did begin minting their own, but in a register Keith would have recognized as the opposite of the human economy he hoped digital money might serve. Where he saw money as memory, a foundation for cooperative life, what we got was money as speculation undermining any such foundation as quickly as it was laid.

For me, the best starting point is neither his writings nor what he called movement and world travel. It was the one-on-one conversations with his students. In my own supervisions with him, he was just as likely to hold forth on the economic life of hunter-gatherers as to dedicate the hour to a recent sentimental conflict, a childhood memory, or a theory about brain chemistry. But always it came back to anthropology.

Keith was an unlikely supervisor for me, a student whose dissertation concerned homeless children in Brazil. He had never worked with children and at the time he hadn’t set foot in Brazil either. Still, I often had the sense that he observed things in my field setting that I myself had overlooked. He knew, for instance, when the children were second-guessing my role in the field.

Once I dropped by his office to leave him the first draft of a new chapter. It could not have taken me more than fifteen minutes to walk back to my rented room, but when I arrived the phone was ringing. It was a long chapter, but Keith had read it already. More than that, he seemed to know every detail of it better than I did. As he spoke for close to an hour, I had the sense that nothing else in the universe mattered very much to him at that moment beyond getting the observations I had described and the theory that framed them right.

Notwithstanding his focus on world systems, Keith always had a way of creating tiny, self-contained universes through conversation, some of which I am still inside. So long as you never made the mistake of posing a direct question, the rest simply flowed.