I spent the summer of 1997 in Keith Hart’s house in Cambridge, England. There is nothing necessarily unusual in this, except that we didn’t really know one another before I arrived, and he wasn’t there half the time, including the first week or so of my visit. We had met twice before this stay. The first meeting was for about five minutes, also in Cambridge, the previous summer. In that initial brief encounter in 1996, I had expressed my appreciation for the pamphlet series he was running at the time, with Anna Grimshaw, called Prickly Pear. He wanted to know if I could help with distributing the pamphlets in the United States. I said yes. That cemented our connection. A few months later he showed up at my house in Charlottesville, Virginia, with a suitcase full of pamphlets for me to sell. On this second occasion we had about an hour with one another. If you were a fan of Keith, and if you believed in his vision of what was possible, you were a fellow traveler—a fast friend, which for him was also an ally of sorts.

The summer I spent in his house was marked by mourning for both of us. One of my best friends from childhood died tragically in the Himalayas, mountaineering, not long after I arrived in Cambridge. One of Keith’s closest friends, Roy Rappaport, was in the final stages of a terminal illness. Rappaport had been working on his magnum opus, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, for years. By the summer of 1997, he was too unwell to finish it. Keith took on the task of preparing the final manuscript. It came out posthumously in 1999.

Our conversations that summer often lasted hours past the evening meals we shared. We talked about Rappaport and we talked about my friend. Although Keith was thirty years older than me, these conversations didn’t have a father-son dynamic, or even mentor-student. That’s not to say Keith didn’t have more wisdom and experience; he most certainly did. But Keith wasn’t very attentive to such kin-like dynamics. He basically interacted with everyone the same way. The last time I saw him in person, in 2016, was for dinner at his apartment in Paris. My children were there, aged nine and eleven, but that didn’t seem to matter, in terms of the conversation at the table. My daughter, the eleven-year-old, remarked upon this when we left. She had been subjected to dinner with many anthropologists, but none quite like Keith. He operated on a single level. Like many others before and since, Keith liked to invoke that line from E. M. Forster, “Only connect.”

One of the running themes in Keith’s anthropological work concerns the moral and social bonds created by exchange. In this he connects to a long line of ancestors and interlocutors: Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, Georg Simmel, Annette Weiner, Jonathan Parry, and many others. Looked at over the course of his career—a half century of peaks and troughs, arrivals and departures—this commitment could be divided into three overlapping interests.

The first related to his interest in the “informal economy,” a term he helped popularize (and sometimes claimed to have coined). Like all great ideas, it was a simple one, which is that a lot of economic activity falls outside the purview of the state and formal sectors. He approached this initially through his work in the markets and streets of Accra, especially with Frafra traders. The concept of the informal economy took off in development circles in the 1970s, but for Keith it was always important to remind us that “it is nominalism of the most haphazard sort that the urban poor have an informal economy, but their rich masters do not” (1985, 58).

The second interest zeroed in on money, including his classic Malinowski Memorial Lecture of 1986, “Heads or Tails? Two Sides of the Coin,” and culminating in his book, The Memory Bank, published in 2000. In both he traced the shifting mediums of exchange, including the ascendance of “plastic credit cards” in the 1970s and 1980s, which also marked shifts in state/market relations (i.e., the heads and tails). Reading Keith’s work, one also appreciates how his focus on seemingly binary models (formal/informal, the heads and tails) was the way in which he undermined them.

Then there is his engagement with what we might call the information economy, which he also called the human economy. This didn’t move away from the economy as such, but it sought to place the market into a broader framework of institutions, media ecologies, and legal structures. Always a bit of a prophet, one of the many institutions that Keith predicted the demise of was our current model of the university and professional boundaries. His anthropology was one of critique and driven by a politics of liberation. This was evident to me from our earliest years of knowing one another, when, much to my surprise, being an anxious graduate student, he resigned from a secure job at Cambridge to stake out a new life based in Paris. Keith did return to the academy, but he never felt bound to it and increasingly thought of his connections as based in the internet, social media, and public square. This anti-institutionalism, or perhaps better, post-institutionalism, was also the impetus behind his co-founding of Prickly Pear Press; the short-lived but inspiring incorporation of the “small triple-a” (amateur anthropological association); and subsequent Open Anthropology Cooperative (which is still a going concern).

Not long after he enlisted me to help market his pamphlets in America, Keith gave up Prickly Pear. He turned it over to Mark Harris and me, two anthropologists at the start of their careers who had nothing more than enthusiasm and faith. For thirty years now, that press—reincorporated in 2001 as Prickly Paradigm, in collaboration with Marshall Sahlins—has been part of my life. Of course it’s taken different directions. As it happens, it’s just started a new chapter. But the whole enterprise owes something to Keith, to the moral economies he fostered in his friendships and networks, to the spirit of his gifts.