Written by Keith Hart
This talk has four parts. In the first I excavate the revolutionary origins of modern
anthropology and place David Graeber (who died recently) as its leading exponent today. In the second I trace my own political trajectory as an anthropologist. The third part concerns our friendship and David’s political legacy for anthropologists. The last contains reflections on revolution drawing on V.I. Lenin and C.L.R. James.
I feel blessed to have lived in France during a golden age of economic sociology and
institutional economics there. I joined a network of European and Latin American
researchers and activists engaged with alternative forms of globalization. I also learned from witnessing younger French anthropologists open to the contemporary world. I have got to know Marcel Mauss very well, as I could not have anywhere else. I am now writing a book about him as my main predecessor in developing the idea of a human economy and his relevance for our times. This period has been one of prolific writing and world travel and I am grateful for that too. I have a second home in the largest Indian city outside India, Durban in South Africa.
The main point of my talk is that academic anthropologists have a shortened perspective on their own history. They trace its modern origins to the late nineteenth century when
evolutionary world history supported racist western imperialism, followed by the
ethnographic revolution provoked by the First World War. This was a huge step in the right
direction – joining people where they live to understand what they do and think. But
anthropology became a captive of universities committed to bureaucratizing national
capitalism, with results that are so evident today. A narrow, specialized localism,
manifested as writing papers that no-one reads, has replaced anthropology’s mission to
study humanity. In both the last two centuries anthropology has been more descriptive than a method for changing the world.
The last half century has seen the emergence of world society, not yet in a definite form, but enough to undermine the twentieth century’s dominant form of the last century, national capitalism. Society is now losing one home without yet a more inclusive replacement adequate to the challenges of the coming century. I once thought of the European Union as a progressive alternative to nationalism, but no longer; and the pandemic did not do it any favours. Even so, I am grateful to the French state for its health services and for granting me permanent residence. Anthropology should be at the centre of an inter-disciplinary attempt to inform the search for a world society. For that we need to reconnect with the true origins of the modern discipline in the eighteenth century, when anthropology’s object, theory and method served progressive politics – a democratic revolution – before supporting a global takeover and then locking itself up in academic bureaucracy. Its pioneers then were Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, although Giambattista Vico also has a claim.
Claude Lévi-Strauss acknowledged Rousseau as his master and The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) updated Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality
among Men (1754), covering an East Asian region from the Siberia-Assam axis to the
Australian desert. He later renounced this project in favour of Mythologiques’ focus on
stories, not historical fact. Lévi-Strauss was the first major figure of the last century to renew Rousseau’s “anthropology of unequal society” followed by Marshall Sahlins’ Social
Stratification in Polynesia (1958), Jack Goody’s Production and Reproduction (1976) and Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982). Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) and Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State (1884) provided a bridge between Rousseau and these anthropologists.
David Graeber brought this tradition into the twenty-first century. But when, having been
close to its writing, I published a long review of his Debt book under the heading ‘In
Rousseau’s Footsteps’ (2012), David and his anarchist friends preferred to identify
Proudhon as his ancestor. Whatever our chosen genealogies, we agreed that only an
anthropology whose purpose was democratic revolution could restore our anti-discipline’s
progressive political roots.
I now offer a short account of my own political trajectory as an anthropologist. I grew up in a poor area of Manchester, near United’s ground and Europe’s first and still its largest industrial estate. I saw reading and language skills as my passport to the escalator out. I was a career academic from the age of nine, although from twelve I also developed a lifelong interest in betting. I became an expert examination passer at Manchester Grammar school and won a scholarship to Cambridge University to read classics. Before long I switched to social anthropology and acquired a PhD for over two years fieldwork in a Ghanaian slum.
Although I was a career academic, I was not immune to sixties’ politics. We were much
influenced by the anti-colonial revolution and considered that western societies were
decadent. I studied urbanization in Ghana because we believed that the politics of Asian and African independence had much to teach the world. My research topic was political: how could voluntary associations, political parties and public propaganda form illiterate rural migrants as modern citizens? It turned out that Ghana was a police state; and no-one
wanted to talk about politics with me. I rented a place in Accra’s most notorious slum and
soon shifted my focus to the dynamism of the street economy.
I attracted the attention of the secret police and was always a suspect as the informer
behind police raids. Rather than quit, I decided to cross the line to my neighbours’ side of
the law. I was on a list for deportation when a military coup brought in a right-wing
government. I was arrested as a Russian spy and beaten up by soldiers. After that I settled
into a life as a small criminal entrepreneur. I was arrested twice by the police as a receiver
of stolen goods. I had no grant but supported myself from trading profits. I made a deal with police and soldiers to recycle drugs and the money they seized.
This was all highly political in a micro sense. I ended up writing about people’s economic
activities when the bureaucracy cannot reach down to their level, later identified as the
informal economy. I knew as much as the people I lived with about the street economy.
But, like them, I did not understand why the world cocoa price collapsed, causing a national economic crisis, or much about regional history and how “development” had replaced colonial empire. I wanted to enter the world of nation-states and international organizations and joined a development consultancy outfit, while teaching anthropology in British and American universities.
The economists were in charge, so I learned “economese” (how to sound like an economist
without formal training) by writing regularly for The Economist. In the 70s I was a high-level policy adviser in the Cayman Islands, Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong and on West African agriculture. While adding participant observation of macro-level politics to knowledge of the informal economy, I converted to French structuralist Marxism. Emmanuel Terray was a close friend. For a while I chaired the women’s studies programme at Yale, adding feminism to my political engagements.
I felt out of touch in the 1960s. People said that a cultural revolution was going on. But I was a career academic who spent his spare time in cinemas and betting shops. This was a period of full employment and low inflation. My upper middle-class friends could identify themselves as ‘orphans’ and drop out. A good job was waiting for them whenever they wanted it. Some became Trotskyite ‘entryists’, while I drove old ladies to vote Labour in elections. Entryism for me meant moonlighting for the World Bank and The Economist. The world was changing, but not in a progressive way. I had something to say about where the world was going, but I couldn’t say it yet.
The neoliberal counter-revolution against post-war developmental states got the world moving, in the wrong political direction. I published a book on West African development. I only felt in sync with the world’s movement from the late 1980s. The catalyst was a stay in Jamaica, 1986-88.
I was already moving, personally and politically, when the world turned. I turned because I
now had the means of connecting with it. There are intellectuals of structure and of transition. For all his talk of revolution, Marx nailed Victorian capitalism as a structure. Lenin was interested in how to get from A to B. I am with Lenin. The years from 1989 (fall of the Berlin Wall) to 1994 (diffusion of the World Wide Web) saw the most profound changes of my lifetime: the collapse of the Soviet bloc, one-world capitalism, the rise of India and China as capitalist powers, money’s escape from politics and law, and the internet going public.
I knew immediately that the internet would change everything. I spent the late 1980s in
London with the Caribbean revolutionary and writer, C.L.R. James (whom I think of as my
mentor; he died in 1989). I was Director of Cambridge University’s African Studies Centre in the 90s. I turned down a fellowship endowment from Nigeria’s military ruler, organized
conferences on the Angola war and the political crisis in Nigeria’s Delta region and discovered Cambridge’s centrality for the anti-slavery movement around 1800. I chaired a university committee into the uses of information technology for research and teaching and also chaired a faculty committee to reorganize first year teaching. I left Cambridge for Paris in 1997-98; this has been my base ever since. I spent the last decade as co-director of the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria.
I have become more political as I grew older. The Marxist historian, E.P. Thompson, once wrote that “C.L.R. becomes more dangerous the older he gets”. At a much lower level, I hope something similar could be said of me. The last three decades have been more suited to progressive political engagement than the three decades before them. It is hard to combine politics and intellectual life at once, as David obviously did, especially if you must learn a profession, start a family, get a job and all the rest. The world today is a much less benign place for you than it was for me.
Max Weber wrote two brilliant essays about politics and science as vocations. Politics he said is about power and moved by passion; whereas science is about truth and is moved by reason. But politicians who lack reason are unconvincing and the best scientists are enthusiasts. There is a vast literature on whether politics and intellectual life are compatible. Politicians are on the go constantly; they have no time to think, never mind write. Intellectuals need stable time alone. Probably exile and jail are the most conducive situations for combining the two. Every day is a reminder of political injustice and there is plenty of time to think. In my 40s I imagined becoming a politician but realised that I had been in school all my life and would have already jumped ship if I was going to. Accepting an academic vocation as necessary opened up the freedom to explore the many ways of implementing it. I have accepted that I am a teacher and writer. My model is John the Baptist – the intellectual warm up act for the big-time politician, someone who recognizes him or her, but is not that person.
John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mohandas Gandhi devoted their lives to politics, but we remember them most for changing how we think. It is one thing to be politically inspired in your intellectual work, another to take up the political life.
Perspectives in Anthropology 