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

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.

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

• George, Kenneth M.
  Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. (2010)

• George, Kenneth M.
  "Ethics, Iconoclasm, and Qur’anic Art in Indonesia." Cultural Anthropology 24(4):589-622. (2009)

• George, Kenneth M.
  "Ethical Pleasure, Visual Dzikir, and Artistic Subjectivity in Contemporary Indonesia." Material Religion 4(2):172-193. (2008)

• George, Kenneth M., and Andrew C. Willford (eds)
  Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian Publications Series, Cornell. (2005)

• George, Kenneth M.
  Designs on Indonesia's Muslim Communities. Journal of Asian Studies 57(3):693-713. (1998)

• George, Kenneth M.
  Some Things That Have Happened to The Sun After September 1965: Politics and the Interpretation of an Indonesian Painting. In Comparative Studies in Society and History 39(4):599-634. (1997)

• George, Kenneth M.
  Showing Signs of Violence: The Cultural Politics of a Twentieth-Century Headhunting Ritual. Berkeley: University of California Press. (1996)

Kenneth M. George CV

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