Eminent anthropologist Keith Hart draws on the humanities, popular culture and his own experiences to help us explore our own place in history.
We each embark on two life journeys – one out into the world, the other inward to the self. With these journeys in mind, anthropologist, amateur economist and globetrotter Keith Hart reflects on a life of learning, sharing and remembering to offer readers the means of connecting life’s extremes – individual and society, local and global, personal and impersonal dimensions of existence and explores what it is that makes us fully human.
This event marks the launch of Hart's most recent book. See Self in the world: Connecting life's extremes for more information.
This event will be followed by a drinks reception.
About the speakers and chair
Keith Hart’s research has been on economic anthropology, Africa, money and the internet. He contributed the concept of informal economy to development studies. His books include The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (Profile, 2000) and the edited volume Money in a Human Economy (Berghahn, 2017). He has taught on four continents and co-founded the Human Economy Programme in Pretoria.
Kate Meagher is an Associate Professor in Development Studies at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics. She is a specialist in African informal economies, and has published widely on issues ranging from smuggling to the gig economy, including Meagher, K. (2022). Rewiring the Social Contract: Economic Inclusion and the Gig Economy in Nigeria, Hujo and Carter (eds) Between Fault Lines and Front Lines: Shifting Power in an Unequal World, Bloomsbury Academic.
John Tresch is Professor of History of Art, Science and Folk Practice at the Warburg Institute, University of London. He is an editor of the History of Anthropology Review (histanthro.org) and author of The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon and The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science.
Joanna Lewis is based in the Department of International History, LSE. Her recent books are Empire of Sentiment (CUP, 2018) and Women of the Somali Diaspora (Hurst, 2021). She joined Keith in Cambridge African Studies Centre after completing a PhD on British colonial rule in Africa and becoming a Fellow of Churchill College. They jointly edited Why Angola Matters (James Currey, 1995). She is indebted to him for the insights they shared in that decade.