Product details
- ISBN 9781800734203
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Mar 2022
- Publisher: Berghahn Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Eminent anthropologist Keith Hart draws on the humanities, popular culture and his own experiences to help readers explore their 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.
From the introduction:
People have many sides, but I will focus here on two. Each of us is a biological organism with a historical personality that together make us a unique individual. But we cannot live outside society which shapes us in unfathomable ways. Human beings must learn to be self-reliant (not self-interested) in small and large ways: no-one will brush your teeth for you or save you from being run over while crossing the street. We each must also learn to belong to others, merging personal identity in a plethora of social relations and categories. Modern ideology insists that being individual and mutual is problematic. The culture of capitalist societies anticipates a conflict between them. Yet they are inseparable aspects of human nature.
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.
