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 dissertation, “Newcomers in a Small Town: Change and Ethnicity in Rural California,” examined how changing patterns of ethnic relations accompanying vineyard development and Mexican labor immigration started a local process of ethnic and community identity change. Dr. Haley’s publications with Larry Wilcoxon on Chumash Traditionalism and neo-Chumash ethnogenesis (the emergence of a new ethnic group) 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).
Courses taught by Dr. Haley:
ANTH 100 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
ANTH 201 North American Indians
ANTH 228 Globalization and Culture
ANTH 229 Critique of Civilization
ANTH 390 Issues in Anthropology
Visit Dr. Haley's personal web page
here
E-Mail: haleyb@oneonta.edu