Webb Keane grew up in New York City\, gradu ated from Yale College\, where he concentrated in art and philosophy\, and received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. After seve ral years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania\, he joined the University of Michigan in 1997\, where he is now Professor and Director of Graduate Studies. In the Department of Anthropology he is associated with b oth the Social-Cultural and the Linguistic Anthropology subfields. His othe r affiliations include the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and Hi story\, the program in Culture and Cognition\, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
He carried out two years of fieldwork on the island o f Sumba in eastern Indonesia\, which led to his first book\, Signs of R ecognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Drawing on historical records and contemporary fieldwork\, he has also undertaken research on Dutch Calvinism from colonial mission to postcoloni al church. This is the subject of his new book Christian Moderns: Freed om and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. His major ethnographic project at present is about Indonesian language\, media\, and national culture. He is also writing about morality\, ethics\, and virtue as special\, even con stitutive\, problems for social science.
His writings cover a range o f topics in social and cultural theory and the philosophical foundations of social thought and the human sciences. In particular\, he is interested in semiotics and language\; material culture\; gift exchange\, commodities\, and money\; religion\; media and public cultures.
Professor Keane has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton\, NJ\, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford\, CA\, the National Endowment for the Humanities\, and the John Simon Guggen heim Foundation. He has been a visiting professor at the London School of E conomics and a recipient of the Henry Russel Award for scholarship and teac hing from the University of Michigan\, where he is presently a Senior Fello w in the Society of Fellows. In fall 2007 he delivered the Edvard Westermar ck Memorial Lecture in Helsinki. In 2009\, he gave the D. R. Sharpe Keynote Lecture on Social Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School\, a plenary address to the annual conference of the Theoretical Archaeology Gro up\, and the Eleventh Annual Annette B. Weiner Memorial Lecture at New York University.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the D
epartment of Art History\, Visual Art and Theory.
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