Abstract
Keith Hart recollects his intellectual trajectory from his early undergraduate courses in Classics to his conversion to anthropology. He highlights the shift in theoretical perspective unleashed by his own generation and the impacts of the new studies carried out in urban Africa. These, in turn, added another dimension to economic anthropology, which, moving away from classical models, advanced towards an anthropology of markets, informal work, money and the new social relations instituted by migrations that form the new face of the contemporary urban world. The interview is also an important source of behind-the-scenes information on the history of Anglophone anthropology, including the relationship between Keith Hart and Jack Goody, and the tensions and distances in relation to the generation of Meyer Fortes and Evans-Pritchard. It also reveals the ups and downs of development debates, the constitution of new postcolonial polities, and contemporary experiments in economics and anthropology.
Keywords
Anthropology; informality; money; Africa; development