Few anthropological concepts have traveled as far as Keith Hart’s “informal economy,” which altered the course of development economics in the 1970s. He once recalled that he realized its significance much later in his career, having distanced himself from the concept’s initial uptake despite being warned by a senior scholar that he might “never come up with a better idea.” As we now know, Hart’s scholarly innovation did not end there. He helped establish the anthropology of money, pushing the discipline to recognize money’s power to forge rather than merely erode human connections. In doing so, he modeled an anthropology that can appreciate the impersonal as constitutive of the personal. A lifelong student of the “history of great thought,” Hart has left an imprint on anthropology’s history equally great.

This series celebrates the life and scholarship of Keith Hart, who passed away on November 6, 2025. Taking its title from his Substack, the series brings together reflections from those who knew him as a colleague and a collaborator, a mentor and a friend. Composed of different forms—essays, an interview, a brief sketch of Hart’s idea for a novel—the contributions find Hart in motion: taking anthropology to the street with a suitcase of pamphlets for a public beyond the academy; convening the Amateur Anthropological Association, or the “small triple-a,” over a mailing list; running a “criminal enterprise” out of the slums of Accra in the midst of fieldwork; recounting to his students his betting days at Cambridge, which paid well but required “nerves of steel and friends with deep pockets.”

His work finds mention here against the backdrop of these scenes, less as a catalog of achievements than as a legacy inseparable from the many dimensions of his life and passions. The accounts surface several motifs: his love of literature; his hope in money’s democratic possibility; his Kantian universalism; his friendship with C. L. R. James; his difficult-to-locate politics, at once conservative and radical; and his impatience with the institutional forms of anthropology. In these varied recollections, Keith Hart emerges as a singular figure whom anthropology will continue to mourn, celebrate, and read.