About
Hopis And The Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, And The Birth of A Social Field
Dr. Brian Haley, Anthropology
About the Lecture
Dr. Brian Haley from the Department of Anthropology present his recently published book Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field.This book addresses how the Hopi became icons of the followers of alternative spiritualities and reveals one of the major pathways for the explosive appropriation of Indigenous identities in the 1960s. It reveals a largely unknown network of Native, non-Indian, and neo-Indian actors who spread misrepresentations of the Hopi that they created through interactions with the Hopi Traditionalist faction of the 1940s through 1980s. Significantly, many non-Hopis involved adopted Indian identities during this time, becoming "neo-Indians." Exploring the new social field that developed to spread these ideas, Hopis and the Counterculture meticulously traces the trajectories of figures such as Ammon Hennacy, Craig Carpenter, Frank Waters, and the Firesign Theatre, among others.
About Dr. Brian Haley
Brian D. Haley earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1997 after working for two decades in cultural resource management. Before joining SUNY Oneonta in 2000, he taught at UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside. He is a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology, and a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity. He has held fellowships with the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States. He is the author of Reimagining the Immigrant: The Accommodation of Mexican Immigrants in Rural America and co-editor (with Ho Hon Leung, Matthew Hendley, and Robert Compton) of Imagining Globalization: Language, Identities, and Boundaries. With Larry Wilcoxon, he wrote the influential articles “Anthropology and the Making of Chumash Tradition” and “How Spaniards Became Chumash, and Other Tales of Ethnogenesis.” His other writings of note include “Better for Whom? The Laborers Omitted in Goldschmidt’s Industrial Agriculture Thesis,” and “Craig Carpenter and the neo-Indians of LONAI.” Last fall, in addition to Hopis and the Counterculture, he also published “In Cahoots with Neo-Indigenism,” which diagnoses a troubling continuation of colonialism in academia.