BOOK LAUNCH EVENT

Animals, Robots, Gods: 
Adventures in the Moral Imagination

~ Webb Keane (George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan)

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.

Bio

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, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

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 religion and ethics; semiotics and language; material culture; gifts, commodities, and money; and media.

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The book will be published by Penguin (August 2024)
More info here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/454066/animals-robots-gods-by-keane-webb/9780241613207  

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