I am happy to announce the new version 3.0 of The Memory Bank, the digital archive and weblog of my friend and mentor for the past six years, Keith Hart. Keith is a social anthropologist and writer, founder of the Prickly Pear Press and amateur anthropological association (the small triple a) who now teaches at Goldsmith’s College in London.
I met Keith in early 2001 in Mumbai, and organised the first ever PUKAR public lecture at the David Sassoon Library (whose dusty Victorian fittings reminded Keith of the Manchester Philosophical Society). Keith and I ran together from then on, maintaining an intense correspondence and occasionally meeting in different cities. I also came to know those amongst his far-flung network of his friends, including Anna Grimshaw, William Mazarella, Jim Murray, Sunil Khilnani, Marshall Sahlins, Jonathan Parry, Marilyn Strathern, John Hutnyk, Craig Calhoun and many others. His teacher was Jack Goody. The year after I met him, he married the anthropologist Sophie Chevalier, with whom he has lived in Paris for many years now.
The site was first setup by his publishers in the U.K. to promote his book, The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World, published in 2000 at the height of the dotcom boom. In 2002 Keith and I took over http://www.thememorybank.co.uk, and ran a basic html and frames site containing the entire text of the book, which I argued to him needed to reach new audiences. In 2004 we moved the Memory Bank 2.0 and 2.1 to the Plone content management system, and migrated all the html into a dynamic publishing environment. I wanted to allow Keith to learn to self-publish his work online, and he slowly but steadily mastered the web tools, as he had earlier turned e-mail into a new discursive form. Over the past two years he has published much of his recent work. We have now moved this archive into a weblog running on WordPress in the new version.
Keith has been my persisent correspondent, critic, and was a great moral support to me at a crucial time in my mid-twenties in Mumbai. I remain in his debt intellectually, and am pleased to have Keith become that truly rare example of a senior academic (he is 63) who combines a rhetorical proficiency and vision of history with a mastery of the tools of networked communication and online publishing. Over the past six years, the Memory Bank has come to contain the entire text of the book from the earlier site, as well as Keith’s prolific output as a pamphleteer, lecturer, ethnographer, and critic including all his published work, unpublished papers, as well as talks, reviews, and other materials.
The Memory Bank 3.0 now marks Keith’s entry into the blogosphere. Please join us in creating a new Commonwealth.
