Dr. Brian D. Haley will present a talk about his book Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field as part of the State of Arizona Research Library’s 2025 Arizona Author Series. The talk is at 12 p.m. MST, Thursday, April 17, and will be held virtually on Zoom. Attendees are encouraged to register to receive the link to the presentation. After the talk, there will be time for questions from the audience.

This presentation will be recorded and made available on our YouTube channel. Registered attendees will receive a link to the recording once it is available. 

About Hopis and the Counterculture: During the 1960s, countercultural movements adopted ideas of spirituality attributed to the Hopi religion that spread far and wide. How did an Indigenous group’s belief system become so popular? It all started in the 1930s and 1940s when a group of Hopi people split from the tribe and introduced a version of Hopi religion to non-Indigenous people. Yet, the result was a profound misinterpreting and misunderstanding Hopi religion and culture, that promote primitivism, stereotyping, and neo-Indianism.

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Dr. Brian D. Haley is professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Oneonta. He is a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology, and a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity. He has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara and University of California, Riverside. He has held fellowships with the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States. Having begun with archaeology and history in California and with the Navajo of Black Mesa, Arizona, he investigated industrialized agriculture’s effects on ethnic identity, resulting in Reimagining the Immigrant: The Accommodation of Mexican Immigrants in Rural America (Palgrave, 2009) and “Better for Whom? The Laborers Omitted in Goldschmidt’s Industrial Agriculture Thesis” (Human Organization, 2010). His influential publications in Current Anthropology (1997) and American Anthropologist (2005) with Larry R. Wilcoxon on neo-Chumash ethnogenesis and invention of tradition positioned him as a pioneering scholar of claims to Indigenous identity by people with non-indigenous histories. Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field (Arizona, 2024) continues this exploration by documenting the rise of a multi-ethnic network that formed around the idea that self-appointed Hopi “Traditionalists” could save the world from “civilization,” sparking a post-1960 explosion in claims of Indian identity.

This event is part of the 2025 Arizona Author Series. This program is supported by the Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records, a division of the Secretary of State, with federal funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Arizona Center for the Book, a Library of Congress Center for the Book Affiliate.