Michael Harkin
Department of Anthropology
Professor Emeritus - Cultural Anthropology
Michael E. Harkin grew up in California and North Carolina, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in English and International Studies. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1988. He has conducted field research with the Heiltsuk and Nuu-chah-nulth of British Columbia, and in France, Greece, North Carolina, and Wyoming. He wrote The Heiltsuks: Dialogues of Culture and History on the Northwest Coast (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), has edited four books and two special issues. He served as president of the American Society for Ethnohistory and the Society for Humanistic Anthropology; and as editor of the journals Ethnohistory and Reviews in Anthropology. He has held numerous fellowships, including a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Graz in Austria, a Fulbright Fellowship at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania, the William Evans Fellowship at Otago University in New Zealand, and awards from the NEH including a Fellowship and a Visiting Professorship at the Library of Congress. In addition to UW, he has taught at Emory University, Shanghai University, and Montana State University. He is a published poet and recipient of an award for poetry from the Wyoming Arts Council.
Courses Taught:
ANTH 5010 Twentieth-century Anthropological Thought
ANTH 4020/5020 Seminar: Landscape and History
ANTH 4740/5740 Native American Language and Culture
ANTH 4320/5320 Political Anthropology
ANTH/AIST 2210 North American Indians
ANTH 1001 First Year Seminar: Anthropology of Monsters
Recent/Selected Publications:
The Strange Life and Presumed Death of Homo Economicus. In Global Observations of the Influence of Culture on Consumer Buying Behavior, edited by Sarmistha Sarma. IGI International. 2017.
What Would Franz Boas have thought about 9/11? On the Limits of Negative Capability. Historizing Theories, Identities, and Nations, Regna Darnell and Frederic Gleach, eds. pp. 27-40. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2017.
“I Believe We Are Also One in Our Concept of Freedom:” the Dewey-Boas Correspondence and the Invention of Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism. Historizing Theories, Identities, and Nations, Regna Darnell and Frederic Gleach, eds. pp. 41-60. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2017.
The Emotional Archive: The Formation of Social Memory of the Residential School Experience in Canada. Ethnohistory 63:459-67. 2016.
Potlatch in Anthropology, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Ulf Hannerz and Dominic Boyer, eds., pp. 714-18. Oxford: Elsevier. 2015.
Two Cultures: French and American Anthropology Between Science and Humanities. Reviews in Anthropology 43:4: 282-296. 2014.
Harkin, Michael E. and David Rich Lewis, eds., 2007, Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian. University of Nebraska Press.
Harkin, Michael E., ed., 2004, Reassessing Revitalization Movements: Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands, foreword by Anthony F.C. Wallace. University of Nebraska Press. Bison Books edition 2007.
Harkin, Michael E., 2008, The Floating Island: Anachronism and Paradox in The Lost Colony. In Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, and Narrative in Microhistory, edited by James F. Brooks, Christopher R. DeCorse, and John Walton, pp. 121-44. SAR Press.
Harkin, Michael E., 2007, Performing Paradox: Narrativity and the Lost Colony of Roanoke. In Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact, edited by John Lutz, pp. 103-117. University of British Columbia Press.
Harkin, Michael E., 2008, Lvi-Strauss and History. In The Cambridge Companion to Claude Lvi-Strauss, edited by Boris Wiseman. Cambridge University Press.
Research Interests:
Ethnohistory, cultural theory, politics and power, religious movements, environment
and landscape, ethnopsychology, history of anthropology Northwest Coast (Heiltsuk,
Nuu-chah-nulth), Southeast (The Lost Colony), Wyoming (public lands ethnohistory),
France
Other Links:
American Society for Ethnohistory is the main scholarly organization devoted to the study of historical and contemporary indigenous communities
Native Web, provides scholarly resources and information on American Indian groups and issues that concern them
