Anthropology, The University of Texas, United-States
Octobre 2015 à Juin 2016
Ward KEELER became interested in anthropology and Soutehast Asia as an undergraduate at Cornell University, where he started learning Indonesian and Burmese, and studied with Victor TURNER and James SIEGEL. (During that time, he spent one year in Paris, where he attended the seminars of LEVI-STRAUSS and CONDOMINAS.) He lived over three years in Java and Bali before going on to graduate study with Victor TURNER at the University of Chicago. He did doctoral research on Javanese shadow plays, and published two books on that subject, as well as a textbook for the Javanese language. In the mid-1980s, he started doing fieldwork in Burma, where he has concentrated most of his attention in recent years. He spent a year in Mandalay in 1987-1988, and ten months in 2011-2012. He has translated a French anthropologist's monograph on Burmese mediums. He has also produced recordings of Burmese classical music. He is finishing a book about monks in Burma, as well as a book-length memoir about his experiences over forty years of research in Southeast Asia.
"Alternative Hierarchies"
His research project proposes to apply Louis DUMONT's analysis of hierarchy to the study of three Southeast Asian societies with respect both to how they have long been organized, and how they may be changing. The three, where he has done extensive anthropological fieldwork, are Central Java, Bali (both in Indonesia), and Burma/Myanma.
(A paraître) Monks, Autonomy, and Attachment in Buddhist Burma.
(A paraître) « Shifting Transversals: Trans Women's Move from Spirit Mediumship to Beauty Work in Mandalay », Ethnos.
2009. « What’s Burmese about Burmese rap? Why some expressive forms go global », American Ethnologist, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 2-19.
2008. « Teaching Southeast Asia Through Fiction and Memoirs », Anthropology Today, Vol. 24, No. 6, pp. 16-19.
2006. « The Pleasures of Polyglossia », in Between Tongues: Translation and/of/in Performance in Asia, Jennifer Lindsay (ed.), Singapor: Singapore University Press, pp. 204-223.