The University of Arizona Press
Date: Thursday, April 17, 2025
Time: 12-1 p.m., MST
Where: via Zoom, register here for link
Brian Haley will speak about his book, Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field, as part of the 2025 Arizona Author Series. Haley is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Oneonta and a leading scholar of the appropriation of Indigenous identities by people with non-Native histories. He is the author of Reimagining the Immigrant: The Accommodation of Mexican Immigrants in Rural America and the co-editor of Imagining Globalization: Language, Identities, and Boundaries. Haley’s presentation is a virtual event that can be accessed via Zoom. At the end of his presentation, he will answer questions from participants. This presentation will be recorded and made available on the State of Arizona Research Library YouTube channel.
About the book:
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. Drawing on insights into the interplay between primitivism, radicalism, stereotyping, and identity, Haley expands on concepts from scholars such as Roy Harvey Pearce’s notion of “isolated radicals” and Jonathan Friedman’s observations regarding the ascendancy of primitivism amid global crises. Haley scrutinizes the roles played by non-Hopi actors and the timing behind the widespread popularization of Hopi religious practices.
