Michael Kearney

Michael Kearney, Anthropology - Professor, Ph.D. 1968 University of California Berkeley)
Office: 1334 Watkins Hall
Phone: (909) 787-3346
E-mail: michael.kearney@ucr.edu

Professor Kearney's work with transnational Zapotec and Mixtec communities takes him from cloud forests of Oaxaca, to the deserts of Baja California, to colonias of border cities, to fields, orchards, and labor camps in the San Joaquin Valley of California, and to Latino barrios in Los Angeles and Riverside. And sometimes he just walks out of his office to talk with Mixtec migrant workers harvesting oranges and avocados in the University's experimental groves. In addition to recording the migration and life histories of transnational migrant workers he also records the soul voyages of espiritualista shamans who also regularly cross borders without documents. His main research foci are ethnicity, migration, and the theory and ethnography of transnational communities and processes. His work in practical anthropology in Oaxaca and the Californias deals with the creation of effective transnational indigenous organizations for enhancing natural, cultural, and political resources.

Selected Publications

Reconceptualizing the Peasantry: Anthropology in Global Perspective (1996); The Local and Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism, Annual Review of Anthropology (1995); Latin America's Indigenous Peoples Today: Changing Identities and Forms of Resistance in Global Context, in Capital, Power and Inequality in Latin America (1995, with S. Varese, edited by R. Harris and S. Halebsky); The Effects of Transnational Culture, Economy, and Migration on Mixtec Identity in Oaxacalifornia, in The Bubbling Caldron: Race, Ethnicity, and the Urban Crisis (1995, edited by M. P. Smith and J. R. Feagin); A Survey of Oaxacan Village Networks in California Agriculture (1994, with D. Runsten); Desde el Indigenismo a los derechos Humanos: Ethnicidad y Política más allá de la Mixteca, Nueva Antropología (1994); Mixtec Migrants in California Agriculture: A New Cycle of Poverty (1993, with C. Zabin, A. Garcia, D. Runsten, and C. Nagengast); World View (1984); Los Vientos de Ixtepeji; and The Winds of Ixtepeji: World View and Society in a Zapotec Town (1972).