To explore approaches to the ways ethics and morality are embedded in the activities and habits of ordinary life, Webb Keane, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, will present "Life with Others and the Modalities of Ethics," Nov. 9 at 4:30 p.m. at Cornell's Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall, as part of the College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Lecture series. A reception at the A.D. White House will follow the lecture. Both events are free and open to the public.

"Social interaction can itself become a process of moral self-discovery and self-formation," he writes, stressing the importance of difference and conflict for the production of moral consciousness.

As a linguistic anthropologist and semiotician, Keane is "widely recognized as one of the bright stars in the field today," says Andrew Willford, chair of Cornell's Department of Anthropology.

Keane's most recent book, "Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter," addresses the problem of fetishism and what he calls "the moral narrative of modernity." Both the American Anthropological Association and the American Academy of Religion sponsored symposiums on "Christian Moderns" at their annual meetings.

Keane's current Indonesian research focuses on national language, semiotic ideologies, print and electronic media, and public and cosmopolitan cultures. His main ethnographic focus, he writes, is on "blasphemy, secular understandings of language, and ideas about freedom in Indonesian journalism," while his comparative and theoretical work focuses on "problems in religion, secularism, ethics and morality, the dialectics of objectification, and on rethinking the material dimensions of social and cultural life."

Keane has been interviewed by CBS TV News, National Public Radio, the Financial Times of London, USA Today, National Geographic, Voice of America and the Los Angeles Times, among others, on such varied topics as gifts and commodities, religion and secularism, and material culture and possession.

In summer 2011, Keane will teach a six-week seminar at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell on "Rethinking Ethics: Cognitive and Ethnographic Approaches."

The Arts and Sciences Humanities Lectures are presented with support from the Office of the President and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Linda Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.