Webb Keane

Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.

Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter

Christian Moderns

Webb Keane argues that by looking at representations as concrete practices we may find them to be thoroughly entangled in the tensions and hazards of social existence. This book explores the performances and transactions that lie at the heart of public events in contemporary Anakalang, on the Indonesian island of Sumba. Weaving together sharply observed narrative, close analysis of poetic speech and valuable objects, and far-reaching theoretical discussion, Signs of Recognition explores the risks endemic in representational practices. An awareness of risk is embedded in the very forms of ritual speech and exchange. The possibilities for failure and slippage reveal people's mutual vulnerabilities and give words and things part of their power. Keane shows how the dilemmas posed by the effort to use and control language and objects are implicated with general problems of power, authority, and agency. He persuades us to look differently at ideas of voice and value. Integrating the analysis of words and things, this book contributes to a wide range of fields, including linguistic anthropology, cultural studies, social theory, and the studies of material culture, art, and political economy.

Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society

Signs of Recognition

Didier Fassin

Michael Lambek

Veena Das

Anthropology has recently seen a lively interest in the subject of ethics and comparative notions of morality and freedom. This Masterclass brings together four among the most eminent contributors to the discussion of ethics and morality within the field Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane. In this multi-authored volume, each author provides a distinct lecture and responses to the other lectures, inviting readers into the conversation and elaborating some of their thoughts on the presence of ethics in social life and current theoerical debate. How do we recognize the ethical in different ethnographic worlds? What constitutes agency and awareness in everyday life? What might an ethnography of ordinary ethics look like? And what happens when ethics confronts the political in both Western and non-Western societies? Contrasting in perspective and method, yet profoundly complementary, this Masterclass will serve as an essential guide for how an anthropology of ethics can be formulated in the twenty first century. "

Anthropological Perspectives

Four Lectures on Ethics

Chris Tilley

Susanne Kuechler

Patricia Spyer

Mike Rowlands

The study of material culture is concerned with the relationship between persons and things in the past and in the present, in urban and industrialized and in small-scale societies across the globe. The Handbook of Material Culture provides a critical survey of the theories, concepts, intellectual debates, substantive domains and traditions of study characterizing the analysis of things. It is cutting-edge: rather than simply reviewing the field as it currently exists. It also attempts to chart the future: the manner in which material culture studies may be extended and developed. The Handbook of Material Culture is divided into five sections. • Section I maps material culture studies as a theoretical and conceptual field. • Section II examines the relationship between material forms, the human body and the senses. • Section III focuses on subject-object relations. • Section IV considers things in terms of processes and transformations in terms of production, exchange and consumption, performance and the significance of things over the long-term. • Section V considers the contemporary politics and poetics of displaying, representing and conserving material and the manner in which this impacts on notions of heritage, tradition and identity. The Handbook charts an interdisciplinary field of studies that makes an unique and fundamental contribution to an understanding of what it means to be human. It will be of interest to all who work in the social and historical sciences, from anthropologists and archaeologists to human geographers to scholars working in heritage, design and cultural studies.

Handbook of Material Culture

The human propensity to take an ethical stance toward oneself and others is found in every known society, yet we also know that values taken for granted in one society can contradict those in another. Does ethical life arise from human nature itself? Is it a universal human trait? Or is it a product of one's cultural and historical context? Webb Keane offers a new approach to the empirical study of ethical life that reconciles these questions, showing how ethics arise at the intersection of human biology and social dynamics. Drawing on the latest findings in psychology, conversational interaction, ethnography, and history, Ethical Life takes readers from inner city America to Samoa and the Inuit Arctic to reveal how we are creatures of our biology as well as our history—and how our ethical lives are contingent on both. Keane looks at Melanesian theories of mind and the training of Buddhist monks, and discusses important social causes such as the British abolitionist movement and American feminism. He explores how styles of child rearing, notions of the person, and moral codes in different communities elaborate on certain basic human tendencies while suppressing or ignoring others. Certain to provoke debate, Ethical Life presents an entirely new way of thinking about ethics, morals, and the factors that shape them.

Its Natural and Social Histories

Ethical Life

"I predict the book will be cited frequently by leaders in the field for some time to come. The analysis is exacting and the scholarship absolutely first-rate."—Kenneth M. George, author of Showing Signs of Violence "An amazing book. . . . A deeply textured and theoretically engaged ethnographic work [that] challenges the conventional analytic division between verbal and material domains."—John Pemberton, author of On the Subject of "Java"

Webb Keane

Books

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