How do we live ethical lives alongside others? A fascinating, mind-expanding exploration of our moral universe

We have always lived with ethically significant others, whether they are the pets we keep, the gods we believe in or the machines we are endowing with life. How should we treat them as our world changes?

In Animals, Robots, Gods, acclaimed anthropologist Webb Keane provides a new vision of ethics, defined less by our minds, religion or society, and more by our interactions with those around us. Drawing on ground-breaking research by fieldworkers around the world, he explores the underpinnings of our moral universe. Along the way we investigate the ethical dilemmas of South Asian animal rights activists, Balinese cockfighters, Japanese robot fanciers -- even macho cowboys. We meet a hunter in the Yukon who explains his prey generously gives itself up to him; a cancer sufferer in Thailand who sees his tumour as a reincarnated ox; a computer that gets you to confess your anxieties as if you were on the psychiatrist's couch.

With charm, wit and insight, Keane offers us a better understanding of our doubts and certainties, showing how centuries of conversations between us and non-humans inform our conceptions of morality, and will continue to guide us in the age of AI and beyond.

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.

Anthropology has recently seen a lively interest in the subject of ethics and comparative notions of morality and freedom. This masterclass brings together four of the most eminent anthropologists working in this field-Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane-to discuss, via lectures and responses, important topics facing anthropological ethics and the theoretical debates that surround it. The authors explore the ways we understand morality across many different cultural settings, asking questions such as: How do we recognize the ethical in different ethnographic worlds? What constitutes agency and awareness in everyday life? What might an anthropology of ordinary ethics look like? And what happens when ethics approaches the political in both Western and non-Western societies. Contrasting perspectives and methods-and yet in complimentary ways-this masterclass will serve as an essential guide for how an anthropology of ethics can be formulated in the twenty-first century.

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.

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.

"Webb Keane's book demonstrates, once again, that nothing illuminates the puzzles of modernity as effectively as cross-cultural studies of colonial encounters. His careful, interdisciplinary, and penetrating analysis of the semiotics of conversion to Dutch Calvinism in the Indonesian island of Sumba and his skillful blending of theological and anthropological issues will make this book a model for studies of religious conversion. It truly deserves a wide readership."--Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of "Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference"
""Christian Moderns" is a wonderful exploration of the boundaries between material things, words, and agents, and the implications of their separation and interconnection for the master trope of modernity. In a rich and challenging analysis, . . . the book shows how a Christian modernity was negotiated and inhabited. The elaborate care with which Keane argues this thesis is truly impressive. I do not know of any other anthropological book on the same theme that can compare with it."--Talal Asad, author of "Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam"
""Christian Moderns" is the kind of book every anthropologist would like to have written. Keane moves easily between the large and small picture: modernism, purification, and Protestantism; a religious conversion or the changing value of meat on the Indonesian island of Sumba. In developing a semiotic ideology, he is able to address at once verbal and material culture, ritual speech and exchange, innerness and sincerity, agency, intentionality and fetishism, and the mutual misrecognitions of the missionary and the 'pagan.' I knowof no book that is as sensitive to the embedded, the spiritual, conundra, of religious contact and conversion and yet remains rigorous in argument."--Vincent Crapanzano, author of "Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench"
"In this remarkable work, Webb Keane juxtaposes European religious disputes with an ethnographic account of Christian conversion in Indonesia. Abiding dilemmas of western social science--he argues--have their source in language ideologies that anthropologists share with the Protestant missionaries who preceded them. Anxieties about objectification, agency, and the erasure of materiality have been crucial to Calvinism. They are no less central to colonial modernization projects and our own logics of inquiry. In lucid prose, Keane builds a powerful argument about semiosis and material life that is sure to stimulate important debate."--Susan Gal, co-author of "The Politics of Gender After Socialism"

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.

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.