Webb Keane

Associate Professor, Ethnology
Ph.D. 1990, A.M. 1984 University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology
B.A. 1977 Yale College

Recent honors and fellowships:
Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (deferred)
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Bevahioral Sciences, Stanford (2003-2004)
Faculty fellow, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan (2001-2002)
Henry Russel Award for scholarship and teaching, Rackham Graduate School, University of Michigan (2000)
Member, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study (1997-98)
Fellowship for University Teachers, National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-94)

Biography:
Webb Keane is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and an affiliate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. In addition, he holds a temporary appointment in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. His work centers on problems of social and cultural theory, especially as they concern signifying practices, both verbal and material. He works on semiotics and language ideologies; exchange, money, and commodities; material culture; religion; modernity and historical consciousness; and the philosophical foundations of social thought. Ethnographically, his research ranges from contemporary performances of ritual poetry and ceremonial gift giving on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, to the work of Dutch Calvinist missionaries in the colonial East Indies, and the debates among nationalists, literati, and language reformers in urban Indonesia. The regional scope of his teaching and research interests extends across Southeast Asia and Oceania.

Courses taught
Undergraduate courses:
• 246 Anthropology of Religion
• 332 Social Forms (Exchange, Commodities, and Money)
• 374 Language and Culture (course homepage)
• 404 Peoples and Cultures of Southeast Asia
• 527 Traditions in Ethnology II

558 graduate seminars:
• Exchange, Commodities, and Money
• Performance and Performativity
• Semiotic Anthropology
• Anthropology of Modernity
• 576 Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

Publications:
Books
Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press (1997)

In progress: Protestants, Missionaries, and the Paradoxes of the Modern Subject

Handbook of Material Culture (co-editor, with Chris Tilley, Susanne Kuechler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer. Sage Press, in progress)

Articles
"Two Epistemologies and the Problem of Objectification" (The Politics of Method in the Social Sciences, edited by George Steinmetz, Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming)

"Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things" (in Language and Communication, vol 23, nos 2-3, special issue "Words and Beyond: Linguistic and Semiotic Studies of Sociocultural Order," ed. Paul Manning, pp 409-425, 2003)

"Language and Religion" (invited contribution, A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology ed. Alessandro Duranti, Blackwell, forthcoming)

"Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Genealogy" (Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 222-248, 2003)

"Public Speaking: On Indonesian as the Language of the Nation" (Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 503-530, 2003)

“Epilogue: Anxious Transcendence” (in The Anthropology of Christianity, ed. Fenella Cannell, Duke University Press, under review)

“Second Language, National Language, Modern Language, and Post-colonial Voice” (in Translation and Anthropology, ed. Paula Rubel and Abraham Rosman, Bers, pp153-175, 2003)

"Sincerity, 'Modernity,' and the Protestants" (Cultural Anthropology, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 65-92, 2002)

"Money is No Object: Materiality, Desire, and Modernity in an Indonesian Society" (in The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, ed. Fred Myers, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 65-90, 2001)

"Response: Joel Robbins' 'Ritual Communication and Linguistic Ideology'" (Current Anthropology, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 603-604, 2001)

“Voice” (in “Key Terms in Language and Culture”, ed. Alessandro Duranti. Malden, MA & Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 268-271, 2001)

“The Materiality and Locality of Everyday Lives: A Review Essay” (Indonesia, vol. 68, pp.178-186, 1999)

"Calvin in the Tropics: Objects and Subjects at the Religious Frontier" (in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 13-34, 1998)

"From Fetishism to Sincerity: Agency, the Speaking Subject, and their Historicity in the Context of Religious Conversion" (Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 39, no. 4; pp. 674-693, 1997)

"Religious Language" (Annual Review of Anthropology, 26: 47-71, 1997)

"Knowing One's Place: National Language and the Idea of the Local in Eastern Indonesia" (Cultural Anthropology 12, 1: 1-27, 1997)

"Money as Matter and Sign" (Etnofoor 9, 1: 71-81,1996)

"Materialism, Missionaries, and Modern Subjects in Colonial Indonesia" (in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 137-170, 1996)

"Religious Change and Historical Reflection in Anakalang, West Sumba, Indonesia" (Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, 2: 289-306, 1995)

"The Spoken House: Text, Act, and Object in Eastern Indonesia" (American Ethnologist 22, 1: 102-124, 1995)

"The Value of Words and the Meaning of Things in Eastern Indonesian Exchange" (Man, now The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute N.S, 29, 3: 605-629, 1994)

"Delegated Voice: Ritual Speech, Risk and the Making of Marriage Alliances in Anakalang" (American Ethnologist 18, 2: 311-330, 1991)

"Mémoire Incarneé: Les Tombes a Sumba/Embodied Memory: Tombs on Sumba" (Art Tribal Musée Barbier-Mueller 1990, 2 (3-16)

"Ombres des Hommes et des Esprits: Les Mamuli de Sumba/Shadows of Men and Spirits: Mamuli of Sumba" (Art Tribal Musée Barbier-Mueller 1988, 2 (3-15)

Website: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/anthro/faculty/keane.html