Kenneth M. George

Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1989
Professor of Anthropology
At UW-Madison since 1999

Cultural Anthropology

Affiliations: Center for Southeast Asian Studies; Religious Studies Program; Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle; Visual Culture Studies Steering Committee

Research

Ken George is a specialist on Southeast Asia and has been the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies since 2005.  His research principally concerns the cultural politics of language, art, religion, and violence.  Ken’s early work in Indonesia (1982-1992) dealt with ritual speech, song, and violence.  Since 1994, he has been collaborating with Indonesian painter A. D. Pirous in exploring the predicaments and possibilities for Islamic visual culture in national and transnational art publics, especially those wounded by state violence.  Ken is also using that collaboration to set agendas for ethnographic art historical research, and the cross-disciplinary analysis of ideology, experience, and subjectivity.

Teaching

Ken offers anthropology courses on language, art, and ideology; public culture; and social theory.   He also teaches classes on Southeast Asia.

Select Publications

• George, Kenneth M. (forthcoming)
  Art and Identity Politics: Nation, Religion, Ethnicity, Elsewhere. In Cosmopolitans in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Kathryn Robinson.  New York:  Palgrave.
• George, Kenneth M., and Andrew Willford, editors (2004)
  Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia.  Southeast Asian Publications Series, Cornell. 
• George, Kenneth M. (2004)
  Violence, Culture, & the Indonesian Public Sphere: Reworking the Geertzian Legacy.  In Violence: Culture, Performance and Expression, edited by Neil L. Whitehead.  pp. 25-54. Santa Fe: SAR Press.
• George, Kenneth M. (1999)
  Signature Work: Bandung, 1994.  Ethnos 64(2):212-231.
• George, Kenneth M. (1996)
  Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual.  Berkeley: University of California Press. (Awarded the 1998 Harry J. Benda Prize for Southeast Asian Studies by the Association for Asian Studies.)

Curriculum Vitae

Kenneth M. George CV

Contact

Office: 5239 Sewell Social Science Bldg.
Telephone: (608) 890-1114
Email address: kmgeorge@wisc.edu