Keith Hart

When you talk with De Soto, it's these guys are not registered and therefore they're not growing.

And they're all perfectly valid ways of looking at the original Keith Hart concept of informality was actually referring to micro firms not having the kind of formal mechanisms of being a firm, formal processes of being a firm.

So it meant something specific when he first used it.

But it's since kind of grown to and fairly effectively just encompass that blob that you're talking about, all this huge economy that has few connections with the state or partial connections with the state, which is actually the case.

So I think letting, in, in my case, African contexts set the frameworks, uh, rather than imposing them, and if you want, we can say letting the ethnographic, uh, context or the ethnographic scale, uh, set the frameworks rather than importing them.

It's, it's, it's impor- It, it's, it's closer to Keith Hart's, [laughs] uh, concept in 1973 because he, he, he wrote the paper against development economists who weren't taking his, uh, craft field work seriously.

So the, the whole point was that ethnography was correcting imported models, and what happened afterwards, I think, is that the concept got exported back into a measurable and comparable sector for policy indicators, which is the opposite move of what Keith Hart, uh, wanted, um, at, at the very first place.

So I think going back to field work driven categories isn't a radical break with the tradition, but it's closer to the original impulse than the mainstream use of Keith Hart's own, uh, terms, um, if you see what I mean.

Yeah, totally.

I, I think we need to go back to, to, you know, ethnographic-grounded, uh, frameworks, and I think informality is in a way, even though it has become something else, but in, in its origin, it, it came out from, from trying to make sense of, of the, of a particular field work setting.