Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.  He is affiliated with the Social-Cultural and the Linguistic subfields in the Anthropology Department, as well as the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a visiting fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

His writings cover a range of topics in social and cultural theory and the ethnography and history of Southeast Asia. In particular, he is interested in religion and ethics; semiotics and language; material culture; gifts, commodities, and money; and media. His new book (published globally in 2024 except in the US and Canada, where it will appear in 2025), is about the ethical dilemmas posed by interactions with non-humans and near-humans, including animals and AI.

His regular undergraduate course offerings include Language and Culture; Anthropology of Religion; Exchange, Commodities, and Money; and Southeast Asia. His regular graduate seminars are the core course on anthropological theory (part 2), Semiotic Anthropology, Ethnographies of Ethics and Morality, Southeast Asia, and Ethnography beyond the human.

To schedule an appointment, please go to this link

JUST OUT: Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (Penguin/Allen Lane)

Here’s a review in the Times Literary Supplement

OpEd essay: Why we treat AI like a god” (July 27, 2023)

His previous book, Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories was published by Princeton University Press in 2016.

His first book, Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society is based on 2 years of fieldwork on the island of Sumba in Indonesia.

The second book Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter concerns the impact of Protestantism and the project of being modern from colonial mission to postcolonial church.

He participated in the collaborative venture Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives which can be downloaded for free.

He is also a co-editor of The Handbook of Material Culture and an occasional contributor to Public Books, Immanent Frame and Material World.