March 2026. Here I am back in Marshy’s Fish and Bammy, a wood slat and zinc food shop by the side of a road in Kingston, Jamaica. It is now thirty-five years since Marshy and I first became friends, at a much smaller incarnation of this shop sited on the other side of the road: drinking a cup of his locally famous fish soup, waiting to go up into the hills for a “nine night” (a wake for the dead) with other corner friends (Wardle 2000; 2002). All of them, save for the two of us, have since died, though the shop has accumulated new “corner” personnel. Taking stock, literally and metaphorically—in his forties when I first met him, now eighty-three—Marshy comments philosophically, “We are just passing through.”

This is the third time when my fieldwork here has been overshadowed by an American-initiated war in the Middle East (cf. Wardle 2017; 2023). Today a tall man lopes into the shop, asking for a breakfast while listening to an extended critique of Trump’s attack against Iran on his phone. He switches between YouTube channels, at one point picking up reporting from broadcaster GB News. While collecting his yam, dumplings, and saltfish, he provides his own commentary connecting the bombing with Israel’s control over the West Bank, poverty in Jamaica, and the common history of European colonialism.

Of course, it is not the only conversation going on. People come in and drop off bags, using Marshy’s place as a kind of free consignment. A man is explaining how he paid J$70,000 to learn how to disrupt court proceedings using magical ingredients including gungu leaves. Other clientele argue over the phone with relatives about money or care for a child or a granny or an aunty. Someone is talking about the recent corruption scandal at the local hospital. Prices for medical treatment were already sky high and locals now bypass the hospital by getting a referral to a Cuban doctor downtown.¹ One Rasta is telling the other customers that rather than using Viagra, middle-aged men should accept that they will be “softer.” A young man claims that the problem is the opposite and that women won’t even look at youth for a relationship; they prefer older men because they already have capital. A woman enters the shop, initially making a playful response to this, but then turning the conversation toward how to make nice food from a few staples for a large family. She lists tasty recipes. Sometimes, though, all you can tell the children at the end of the day is, “Tomorrow will be better.”

What has struck me, again and again, is how this inconspicuous venue in the Caribbean periphery holds together the local and the global. Marshy’s shop is a place for food, gossip, and laughter, but also for frustrated commentary on Trump’s foreign policy, Israel’s occupation, diasporic kin networks, and Jamaica’s colonial inheritance (cf. Wardle and Obermuller 2019). It is a trusted space for public deliberation—a living example of what Keith Hart sought to illuminate through his idea of the informal and later the human economy (Hart 1973; Hart et al. 2010).

Hart’s original concept of the informal economy highlighted the full spectrum of economic life, hence the “autonomous capacity,” that was escaping state and corporate visibility (1973, 61). In Jamaica, as elsewhere (Williams 2023), the umbrella term “informal sector” is now used by development economists to describe the statistically untraceable and unaccountable section of economic activity. What Hart stressed—what mattered to him—are the human problems people confront and the creative economic practices through which they address them. The informal economy is not a residual category but a field of obligation, improvisation, and ingenuity. Money and markets are never just about abstract commodity exchange or state policy; they describe the moments and places where ordinary people interpret, negotiate, socialize, and rework global forces into everyday transactions in order to get by. Ethnography is a way of listening to how people themselves are theorizing their position and orienting themselves in what is, from here in the periphery, a world society, characterized by forces of globally ramifying complexity—what Ulrich Beck (1999) called a “world risk society.”

Anthropology’s strength lies, then, in showing how voices in the periphery² can talk back to the center; how informal street sellers are as much makers of the global political economy as are Wall Street traders or ministry officials. Hart’s later reflections on money likewise push beyond simple binaries. In The Memory Bank, he argues that it has never been possible to reduce money to the classic medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account description. Money in the empirical “human” economy (Wardle 2017) condenses memory, trust, and social imagination; it absorbs the magical, religious, rational and practical as means of “persuasion” vis-à-vis contingent scenarios (Hart 2009).

Seen from Marshy’s shop, all this makes sense: Money here circulates not as an abstract metric of value but as part of personal histories, obligations, and reputations, debated and reshaped in the flow of everyday talk. For Hart, the fetishization of money under early industrial capitalism severed these “human” dimensions, casting individuals as abstract vectors of rational choice, income and expenditure. Yet, he argues, in the digital era, money has begun to be reabsorbed and re-personalized in networks of sociability, individual identities and imaginative projects—from sending remittances directly to a mobile phone, to community-based digital trading and exchange schemes (2000).

For Hart, money and markets continue to carry the potential for human freedom, memory, and connection. There remains the potential—never guaranteed—that the democratic impulse can outpace the encroachment of bureaucratic systems and corporate control. But first we have to exit the description of economics as formalized from the center and instead rejoin the human economic flow where people actually live.