Webb Keane grew up in New York City, graduated from Yale College, where he concentrated in art and philosophy, and in 1990 received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. After several years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the Anthropology Department at the University of Michigan in 1997, where he is now an associate professor. He is a member of the Socio-cultural subdivision and an associate in Linguistic Anthropology. In addition, he is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History, the program in Culture and Cognition, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

He carried out two years of fieldwork on the island of Sumba in eastern Indonesia, which led to his first book, Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Drawing on historical records and contemporary fieldwork, he has also undertaken research on Dutch Calvinism from colonial mission to postcolonial church. This is the subject of his forthcoming book Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. His major ethnographic project at present is about Indonesian language, media, and national culture.

His writings cover a range of topics in social and cultural theory and the philosophical foundations of social thought and the human sciences. In particular, he is interested in semiotics and language; material culture; gift exchange, commodities, and money; religion; media and public cultures.

Professor Keane has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, CA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and a recipient of the Henry Russel Award for scholarship and teaching from the University of Michigan.