Faculty Member

Michael Kearney
(Professor, Ph.D. 1968 University of California Berkeley)
Office: 1314 Watkins Hall
Phone: (951) 827-3346
E-mail: michael.kearney@ucr.edu

Curriculum Vitae (PDF format)

Professor Kearney's main geographic areas of interest are Mexico and the United States, with special interest in indigenous Mixtec and Zapotec communities in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca that have high rates of migration to northern Mexico and the United States. At present he is working with the town authorities of a remote Mixtec community in Oaxaca to conduct a complete bi-national census of the citizens of the community, most of whom reside part time or permanently in northern Mexico or in the United States. As originally defined by Kearney and Nagengast (1989), this town is a transnational community, and this census is presumably the first one in which a Mexican community has conducted a census in Mexico and in the United states so as to acquire basic demographic and social data on its legally defined municipal citizens residing in both nations. The primary practical goal of this census is to enhance the governance of this municipality in its transnational context, and to serve as a model for other similar legally constituted transnational communities.

Kearney's main theoretical and practical research interests center on his concept of Practical Anthropology, which is the reflexive application of American four-field anthropology to itself and to its communities. A basic working assumption of Practical Anthropology is that the four sub-field organization (viz., Biological Anthro., Archaeology, Sociocultural Anthro., and Sociolinguistics) has been the basis of American Anthropology's distinctive genius as the premier discipline dealing with human beings, but that it is now time to build on and transcend it, such that the four sub-fields become seamlessly one. Current works in progress speaks to this challenge of how anthropology needs to be pragmatically turned back onto itself to transform itself so as to better promote the global enhancement of human self-knowledge and human well-being as defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Selected publications: Changing Fields of Anthropology: From Local to Global (2004, Rowman & Little Field Publishers, Inc.); 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).