Charles Keyes

Ph.D. 1967, Cornell University. Interpretive anthropology, religion and political-economic change, ethnic and national cultures, sociology of Theravada Buddhism; South East Asia, Thailand, Vietnam.

Department: Anthropology and International Studies
Position: Professor Emeritus
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Phone: (206) 685-1577, (206) 543-5240
Box: 353100
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Research Summary:

Charles Keyes is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and International Studies at the University of Washington. He is also an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology. He has been on the faculty the University of Washington since 1965 and has served at this institution as chair of the department of anthropology (1985-1990) and director of the center for Southeast Asian Studies (1986-1997).

He has also held the Henry M. Jackson professorship of International Studies.
A major focus of his research is rooted in the seminal work of Max Weber concerning the relationship between religion, politics and economics especially as manifest under conditions created by modernity. He has also sought, in a related vein, to pursue the question of how modern states intrude into everyday lives, with particular reference to Thailand where he has carried out long-term fieldwork beginning in the 1960s. Closely related to this work has been his interest in how minority peoples have responded to projects of nation-building that all modern states have undertaken. He has focused his work on this issue through fieldwork in northern Thailand, Laos, and northern Vietnam. His work on ethnic responses to nation-building in Southeast Asia provided the basis for theoretical reflection on the nature of ethnicity and the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism.

His most recent research has entailed a restudy of a village in northeastern Thailand in which he and his wife first carried out fieldwork in the early 1960s. The purpose of this research has been to trace how villagers have adapted to transformations in the economy and society which began when Thailand entered the ‘development era’ also in the early 1960s. This research has centered on three demographic and socioeconomic censuses carried out in 1963, 1980, and 2005.

Since taking his PhD in 1967, Professor Emeritus Keyes has authored, edited or co-edited 14 books, monographs or special issues of journals and published over 80 articles. His published work includes “The Politics of Language in Thailand and Laos,” in Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, ed. by Michael E. Brown and Šumit Ganguly (2003): Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos (edited with Shigeharu Tanabe, 2002); “Weber and Anthropology,” Annual Reviews in Anthropology (2002); “‘The Peoples of Asia’: Science and Politics in Ethnic Classification in Thailand, China and Vietnam,” Journal of Asian Studies (2002); The Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia (reprinted, 1995); Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia (edited with Laurel Kendall and Helen Hardacre, 1994); Thailand: Buddhist Kingdom as Modern Nation State (1987), Karma: An Anthropological Inquiry (edited with E. Valentine Daniel, 1983); and Ethnic Change (edited, 1981).

He has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (Fulbright). In December 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Mahasarakham University in Thailand. His other recent honors include selection for a visiting professorship at Göteborg University in Sweden under a fellowship from the Scandinavian School of Advanced Asian and Pacific Studies to (2004), election as president of the Association for Asian Studies (2001-02), selection as a keynote speaker for the Eighth International Thai Studies Conference in Amsterdam (1999) and again for the Ninth International Thai Studies Conference in Thailand (2003), and selection as the David Skomp distinguished lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Indiana (2001). In 2003 he was given the Graduate Mentoring award by the University of Washington in recognition for his work supervising the PhD committees of 41 students and 20 MA students (nearly a third of whom have come from Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Hong Kong).

In addition to serving as president of the Association for Asian Studies, he has been chair of the joint Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Southeast Asia and chair of the executive committee and board of the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute. He currently serves on the editorial boards of five professional journals and is on the publication committee of the University of Washington Press. He is the senior editor of the series, “Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies” for the UW Press. He has played an active role in promoting the development of anthropology in Thailand and Vietnam, most recently as the co-director of a Ford Foundation-funded program to train Vietnamese and Thai researchers for work among upland minorities in the two countries.

Professor Emeritus Keyes has taught primarily at the University of Washington, and also has been a visiting professor at Chiang Mai University in Thailand, Göteborg University in Sweden and the University of California in Los Angeles. His courses include ones on the anthropological study of religion, Theravada Buddhism and society, Southeast Asian civilization, ethnicity, and ethnographic field methods.

Keyes, C. F., (2006), On the margins of Asia : diversity in Asian states, Association for Asian Studies, Ann Arbor, Mich..

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