Faculty Profile: Dr. Brian Haley

Dr. Brian Haley is a cultural anthropologist who completed his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He joined our department in the Fall 2000 semester and is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the department. Before joining our department, Dr. Haley was Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and Post-doctoral Research Anthropologist at the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States.

Dr. Haley's teaching and research addresses how ethnic, racial, and national identities form and change; the social and cultural consequences of capitalist agriculture, Mexican immigration, globalization, and tourism; and the application of anthropology to practical issues such as immigration, heritage management, and ethnic relations. He has conducted ethnographic research in rural communities in California recently made multiethnic by Mexican farm worker immigration, ethnohistorical research on the original Spanish colonists of California and their descendants, and ethnohistorical and archaeological research on Navajo and Chumash Native American communities in Arizona and California. Recently, he has also been documenting the varied ways in which anthropology, over the course of its history, has mirrored, sustained, and also undermined the popular distinction between so-called civilized and primitive societies.

Dr. Haley’s newest book, Reimagining the Immigrant: The Accommodation of Mexican Immigrants in Rural America (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009) examines the coexisting practices of established residents’ discrimination against and accommodation of Mexican immigrants in a small farm town in California, and the ways in which immigrants and established residents reimagine immigrant ethnic identity in a more positive light. He also co-edited and authored a chapter in Imagining Globalization: Language, Identities, and Boundaries (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), which gives voice to the peoples and groups impacted by globalization as they seek to negotiate their identities, language use, and territorial boundaries within a larger global context. Dr. Haley’s other major publications address Chumash Traditionalism and neo-Chumash ethnogenesis (the emergence of a new ethnic group), and have sparked considerable debate and discussion on the nature of ethnicity and tradition, and ethics in applied anthropology. (See, e.g., “Anthropology and the making of Chumash tradition,” Current Anthropology 38:761-794, 1997, and “How Spaniards became Chumash, and other tales of ethnogenesis,” American Anthropologist 107:432-445, 2005, both with Larry R. Wilcoxon).