Perspectives in Anthropology

Internet-based magazine

How the informal economy took over the World – Part 2 by Keith Hart

The dialectics of form “General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, and every Particular is a Man” (William Blake). Most readers of this book live substantially inside what we may call the formal economy. This is a world of salaries or fees paid on time, regular mortgage payments, clean credit ratings, fear of the […]

How the informal economy took over the world by Keith Hart

A la recherche du temps perdu (In search of lost time) The idea of an informal economy was born at the moment when the post-war era of developmental states was drawing to a close. The 1970s were a watershed between three decades of state management of the economy and the free market decades of one-world […]

Seeing Culture Everywhere: A Book Review by Keith Hart

The authors of this well-written book tell how they were pushed by their editor into writing for a general audience. They have succeeded without sacrificing analytical rigor. They are a German freelance anthropologist, journalist and entrepreneur and a professor of anthropological history at the University of Amsterdam. They seek to describe and explain the ubiquity […]

Why George Floyd Matters

With all due respect and no malice intended but the George Floyd murder is not the first time African American men have been wrongfully brutalized and killed by the police in the United States. Even more striking, the graphic violence displayed on video for the world to see of an African American man and a […]

Pandemics: Agents of Global Change – Part 2

The Economic and Commercial Impact of Pandemics: By now, the COVID-19 influenza outbreak has reached practically all parts of the globe. In the context of discussing the pandemic, it serves no purpose to focus on the fact that scientists, medical professionals, public health experts and a handful of concerned economic institutions and businessmen have been […]

Pandemics: agents of global change

It was the early 1990s, while working at the American College of Physicians in Philadelphia, I became interested in epidemiology. With all the doctors around (there were twelve different medical sub-specialties at ACP), it was not hard to be impressed with their serious demeanor about medicine but more important – their extraordinary knowledge. Some years […]

The Collapse of Societies

By now, the entire world is aware of the historic and unprecedented events occurring in the United States. It seems trite to characterize these events as an aberration that will soon pass over. Even more striking, it seems these events will have far-reaching, long-term, damaging effects on not only the Constitution of the United States […]

The Mueller Report: Highlights

The Mueller Report is probably one of the most extensive legal investigations in the history of the United States. Certainly, the circumstances necessitating it are historic and unprecedented in American political documentary. Even more striking, the idea that someone elected to the office of the President of the United States would so openly abuse power […]

The Horror of War – Part 3

Sometime in June 1971, an incident occurred that completely changed my attitude toward the US Army. In fact, I was never the same again. It all began with Brother Bobby’s hooch maid Mai and a white GI that liked her. It seems that when Bobby was working at the Mess Hall, this white GI would […]

The Virus of Violence

In the study of epidemiology, one has an opportunity to learn about communicable and non-communicable diseases. This curriculum is usually pursued on the graduate level and involves a combination of courses that investigate hard sciences dealing with pathogens, hosts, environments, and incubation. Also, it includes study in the soft sciences such as human evolution, human […]

An Anthropologist in the World Revolution – Pt. 2 by Keith Hart

As we approached the millennium, with the dotcom boom roaring away, I wanted to write a book that would sum up 30 years of teaching and point forward at the same time. My first attempt was a textbook, Anthropology and the modern economy. But I found it depressing: it contained nothing of what I had […]

An Anthropologist in the World Revolution – Pt. 1 by Keith Hart

Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, well-known for his inspiring YouTube lectures and documentary shorts, has received over a hundred applications for his graduate course in ‘digital ethnography’ from around the world.1 The only problem: no such course exists. Wesch teaches undergraduates and has organized a ‘digital ethnography working group’ […]

The Real Race Problem – Part 1

On the eve of the one-hundred and eighth anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois’ newspaper The Crisis, we are presenting, in its entirety, a lecture from the distinguished anthropologist, mentor and head of the Anthropology Department at Columbia University for many years – Dr. Franz Boas on the subject of the “race” problem. THE REAL […]

Brazil’s Dichotomous Treatment of Corruption – PT 3

Brazil had an opportunity to be a leading, democratic, Latin American country but lost its sense of direction. The political system designed to assist emerging countries grow and prosper does not work there. Instead of growing, as so many predicted it would, over the last seven years the country has fallen apart.

The Open Anthropology Cooperative: Towards an Online Public Anthropology-by Keith Hart

We attempt here to explore the relationship between anthropology, social media and public engagement through a web-based network that we helped to found and manage. We argue that obscure social and technical dynamics are at work here, but academic anthropology today also poses signiﬁcant obstacles for this enterprise.

Preface to the Coming World Crisis-by Keith Hart

Trump’s election has accelerated talk on the left of the end of (neo-) liberalism and the rise of fascism in the West. The prospects for world war seem closer now. As when the 2008 crash is placed in history, comparison is usually with the 1930s. We need rather to develop a perspective on 1900-2100 as […]

What Anthropologists Really Do-by Keith Hart

The Summary The new anthropologist is a self-appointed people’s representative in the double sense of writing them up and acting as their advocate. And anthropology is a sort of democratic politics, informed by long-term, empty-headed exposure to strangers wherever they live and shaped by the main public issues of the day. This populism is hostile […]

The Second American Revolution

Well, it only took about two-hundred and forty years but the greatest fear of the writers of the Constitution of the United States has taken place. A rich, capitalist class of billionaire Americans have finally taken over the government. It seems that political representatives from states all over the country have sold out their constituents […]

Religion and Economy – Part One-by Keith Hart

Religion belongs to a set of terms that also includes art and science. Science began as a form of knowledge opposed to religious mysticism, but is now often opposed to the arts. If science may crudely be said to be the drive to know the world objectively and art is mainly a means of subjective […]

Capitalism, revolution and racism in the US and the world-by Keith Hart

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, we would do well to recall Hegel’s maxim that difference-in-sameness moves history. Max Weber used a similar argument to moderate the polarised Methodenstreit (Battle over Methods) between Berlin and Vienna about economics in the late 19th century. We would not be interested in the Greeks if they were the […]

Measures of Quality Education

When I first came to Brazil, I quickly became aware of the problem in the educational system here. So, I began to collect statistics and study why the educational levels were so low. During that time, Lula was the president and Brazil was making a serious effort to address its problems in education. The country […]

Why do Leaders Fail?

This is an opinion piece that some might say loosely fits within the realm of anthropology. And yet, if one could say that anthropology is the genealogy and archaeology of human activity, then under those circumstances it should be appropriate. I wish to discuss those things that any head of State, President, or sovereign leader […]

Perennial Narratives in Anthropology

Since the 1960s, there has not been any new innovative advances in the field of anthropology. Although some good work has been done, most of it has been concerned with fleshing out the subtler nuances of what was discovered during that time. The 1960s and 1970s brought to anthropology issues of critical theory and awareness […]

World’s Most Vital Resource

It is not necessary to explain the process by which algae through millions of years of geological time and chemical reactions become fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal. It is important to explain, however, why these fossil fuels have become the most vital resources in the world today. Our modern-day lives depend […]

The War Against Privacy

In the May-June 1993 issue of Wired Magazine, an article on a group of mathematicians advocating a radical, libertarian, cryptographic philosophy appeared on the front cover. The group of scientists called themselves the “Cypherpunks.” By 1996, their political-scientific philosophy had developed into a populace movement against government intrusions into the private lives of individuals. […]