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, twice a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and has taught at the School for Criticism and Theory, Cornell.

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 semiotics and language; religion and ethics; moral economy; and the implications of AI and other new technologies. His most recent book, Animals, Robots, Gods, is about the ethical dilemmas posed by people’s interactions with entities that challenge the line between human and non-human, including cyborgs, certain animals, and AI chatbots.

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

Read the Introduction to Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination.

Read the review in the New York Times Book Review

Read the review in the Times Literary Supplement

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

Other books:

Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories  (2016)

Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (2007)

Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (1997)

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.