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"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."--Publisher's Web site

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

AbstractThe entry of a universal revelation into the mundane world of language threatens to be paradoxical: it must take a specific and local form. As such, it becomes implicated in nationalist, ethnic, linguistic, and other sources of community. This article centers on a small melodrama in late twentieth-century Indonesia, home to the largest number of Muslims of any country. After undergoing a mid-life spiritual awakening, H. B. Jassin, a modernist literary critic, editor, and ardent defender of freedom of expression, undertook two projects intended to convey the aesthetic power of the Qur'an to a non-Arabic speaking public. But if Qur'anic Arabic summons a transnational community of the faithful, standardized Indonesian was developed to address a nation of citizens. If scripture speaks in a divine, uncreated idiom, the national language is shaped by human efforts. Jassin's career had served a vision of literature and its public whose values and semiotic ideologies were dramatically at odds with Qur'anic traditions. Although this may appear at first glance to be a familiar story of progress and its opponents, this article asks whether Jassin's critics grasped something about signs and communities that his defenders did not. Examining the furor that resulted from his Qur'ans, it explores an array of conflicting assumptions about language, freedom, truth, and people's lives together in the late twentieth century.

This is a speculative essay in comparative possibilities. It looks at some widely separated religious contexts in which a power‐laden relationship across ontological difference – for instance, between living humans and a world of gods or spirits – is mediated by operations on the materiality of the written sign. These operations typically result in either materializing something immaterial or dematerializing something material. But they may also involve other activities that take advantage of specific physical properties of the written word such as being persistent, transportable, perishable, alienable, and so forth. Once divine words are rendered into script, they possess a distinctively material quality and form. They appear on some physical medium, and so are both durable and potentially destructible. Anything that can happen to another artefact can happen to them. The practices I dub 'spirit writing' subject the written word to radical transformation, taking advantage of its very materiality in order to dematerialize it, even if only in order to be rematerialized in yet some other form (such as a person's body). Many such practices seek to generate or control religious powers by means of transduction across semiotic modalities, material activities that help render experience‐transcending forces realistic or at least readily imaginable.

Der Verfasser argumentiert, dass die Moderne lediglich im Kontext eines normativen, z. T. idealistischen Geschichtsbildes verstanden werden kann. Ausgerechnet dieses Bild vermittelt ihr eine Legitimation und macht sie 'moralisch' vertretbar. Sie impliziert nicht nur einen materiellen Fortschritt, technologische und/oder ökonomische Entwicklung, bürokratische Rationalisierung, politische Demokratisierung usw., sondern eine emanzipatorische Dimension. Diese bezieht sich auf alle Aspekte von Abhängigkeit und Unterdrückung. Insbesondere die Überwindung der Formen von Unterordnung unter Instanzen geistiger und/oder metaphysischer Natur die mithilfe des Konzepts des Fetischismus bzw. der Religion zusammengefasst werden, steht ganz oben auf der Tagesordnung des emanzipatorischen Anspruchs von Modernisierung. Daher gehört die Säkularisierung zu den Prioritäten der Modernisierung. (ICB)

A comparison of two challenges to freedom of the press, in Indonesia and Denmark, reveals some of the linkages among semiotic ideologies, secularism, and a moral narrative of modernity. By analyzing conflicts between semiotic ideologies, the article shows how actual journalistic practices both presuppose and deviate from the assumptions of any given such ideology. The article also discusses claims about the role of the press in the history of the nation. The case comparison brings out some fundamental tensions between two grounds for this role, to speak as a voice of a people and to serve as a conduit for truth. Viewed in the context of the semiotic ideologies they presuppose, conflicts over the actions and authority of the press can reveal some of the difficulties posed by the moral narrative of modernity and the common sense of contemporary liberalism.

Religious practices are commonly treated as evidence for something else, such as beliefs. There are a number of problems with privileging beliefs or ideas when trying to define religion. An alternative is to rethink the relationship between the materiality of religious activity and the ideas that have sometimes been taken to define 'religion'. This approach may also be a productive way to look at religious practices across widely differing contexts without eliminating their fundamentally historical character.RésuméLes pratiques religieuses sont habituellement envisagées comme des preuves d'autre chose, par exemple de croyances. Or le fait de privilégier les croyances ou les idées pour tenter de définir la religion pose plusieurs problèmes. Une autre approche consiste à repenser la relation entre la matérialité de l'activité religieuse et les idées qui ont parfois été employées pour définir la « religion ». Cette approche peut être un moyen productif d'examiner les pratiques religieuses à travers des contextes très différents, sans éliminer leur caractère fondamentalement historique.