Keith Hart's Page

Two attempts at my story (both sung to an old Hoagy Carmichael tune):

Manchester on my mind

Africa on my mind


About my website.

Since its beginning a decade ago, TMB has been my personal blog with some limited opportunities for members' participation. Now the focus is moving in a more collective and interactive direction. The home page is open to posts from guest authors; a Forum facilitates discussion of some of TMB's themes (the future of anthropology, world society as a commonwealth, economy, African development and so on); TMB Press will be an online publisher of longer pieces.

Banks are slower-moving deposits of fast-moving flows, whether of water, information or money. This website is my Memory Bank, but it is meant to reach out to a public that shares my aims. The two great human memory banks are language and money which are converging into a single network of digital communications in our time. The idea of a 'New Commonwealth' refers to the possibility that money might serve the purposes of economic democracy more fully than it has; but beyond that to the need to make a world society fit for all humanity.

We face an extraordinary moment in history when the old structures are palpably failing. The formation of a global civil society, even a world state, is an urgent task. Anthropology has a distinguished past, but it has an even greater role to play in future, not necessarily as an academic discipline, but perhaps as an interdisiciplinary project: to discover what we need to know about humanity as a whole if we would make a better world. Such a project depends on making full use of the emerging social and technical synthesis entailed in the digital revolution.