Dr. Michael Hathaway is Professor of Anthropology, Associate Member of the , and the Director of 丁香园AV鈥檚  for Asian Studies. A , his work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and Toyota Foundation, among others.

His first research project examines global environmentalism and the politics of Indigeneity. This research was based on multi-sited fieldwork in rural and urban Southwest China. It explored how local residents, Chinese scientists and expatriate conservationists forge new constellations of meanings, practices, and forms of governance in contemporary China. This work examines changing understandings of nature, social categories, and power. It was published as (University of California Press, 2013).

His second major project explores the global commodity chain of the matsutake, one of the world鈥檚 most expensive mushrooms, following it from the highlands of the Tibetan Plateau to the markets of urban Japan. In it, he asks what happens when we imagine 鈥渨orld-making鈥� not to be capacity exclusive to humanity, but as a part of all organisms, including the seemingly humble fungus? This work has culminated in a new book, called , (Princeton University Press, 2022). It is the second volume in a trilogy, starting with Anna Tsing鈥檚 . This project is part of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, with Tim Choy, Lieba Faier, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka and Elaine Gan. The team explores the more-than-human social worlds this mushroom engenders in Canada, the United States, China, and Japan.

Michael is currently working on two more major projects and seeking interested graduate students to join his research teams. One of these current projects, is an Indigenous-majority led collaboration with Professors (Uyghur), (Anishinaabe) and (Yellowknives Dene), as well as Doctoral student (Dunne-Za Cree). It explores the rise of Indigenous networks in the Pacific Rim as a new way to understand how the Indigenous movement became global starting in the 1970s. The team explores the legacies of a series of all-Indigenous delegations to China from Japan and from Canada.  These trips, virtually lost to the written record, proved momentous, as Indigenous delegates returned to their home countries inspired by what they experienced. They began challenging state authority in unprecedented ways, crafting powerful texts that awakened a generation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to the ongoing colonial structures of society. What is perhaps least appreciated is how going to China helped delegates to reimagine themselves as global subjects who were connected to other Indigenous people, as part of what was called the 鈥淔ourth World.鈥� In other words, this was part of the silent, often invisible work of fashioning 鈥淚ndigenous people鈥� as a transnational political category.

By hosting and feasting, they quietly stitched together the fabric of global Indigeneity, a category that was neither obvious nor pre-existing, but took tremendous initiative and creative activity to come into being. This perspective enlivens studies of Indigenous world-making elsewhere, attending to actions that precipitated shifts in consciousness and building relations across geographic and linguistic divides.

The other current project works towards the decolonization of Western science, and especially towards re-imagining forms of biological study. The project challenges the overemphasis on competition as the driving force of evolution and explores how alternative epistemologies might open up new perspectives and insights in biological research.

PhD (Anthropology), University of Michigan
MA (Anthropology), University of Michigan
BA Hons. (Anthropology & Environmental Studies), University of California

China; social studies of science; globalization; Indigeneity; postcolonial theory; history and anthropology; social movements (Indigenous, social justice and environmental); gender studies; critical studies of development; critical studies of race and racial formation; multispecies ethnography, more-than-human studies.

Books

• 2022  . Princeton University Press.
• 2021  (co-eds.) with Leiba Faier. Berghahn Books.
• 2013 .
  Berkeley: University of California Press.
• 1998 . John Tuxill, Gary Paul Nabhan, Elizabeth Drexler and Michael J. Hathaway. Routledge.

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters

• 2022 [With Suzanne Barber] 鈥淐hina鈥檚 Pet Activists: Using Moral Arguments and    Epidemic Concerns to Make Space for Animal Rights.鈥� Invited article for a special issue on Animals and Epidemics in Asia, in International Review of Environmental History, edited by Fa-ti Fan. 8 (1): 63-802016 
• 2018 鈥淓lusive Fungus? Forms of Attraction in Multi-Species World-Making.鈥�  Republished, with some modifications, in Matsutake Worlds (Edited by Lieba Faier and Michael J. Hathaway), 2021.
• 2017 鈥淒iscovering China鈥檚 Tropical Rainforests: Shifting Approaches to People and  Nature in the late Twentieth Century.鈥� In The Nature State: Rethinking the History of Conservation. Edited by Claudia Maria Leal Leon, Matthew Kelly, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg. New York: .
• 2016 鈥淐hinese Indigenous Peoples? How Global Environmentalism Unintentionally Smuggled the Notion of Indigeneity into China.鈥� Humanities 5(3): 54. Doi:10.3390/h5030054.
• 2016 鈥淎nimals as Historical Actors? Southwest China's Wild Elephants and the Worlds they Shape.鈥� In Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research. Edited by Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford, and L. Anders Sandberg. New York: Routledge.
• 2016 鈥淩ethinking the Legacies of 鈥楽ubsistence Thinking鈥� 鈥� for Subsistence Under Capitalism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Edited by James Murton, Dean Bavington and Carly Dokis. Montreal and Kingston: McGill and Queens University Press, 234-253.
• 2016 Review of Tuner, S, ed. 2013. Red Stamps and Gold Stars: Fieldwork Dilemmas in Upland Socialist Asia. Journal of Asian Studies 75(1): 210-211.
• 2015 鈥淲ild Elephants as Actors in the Anthropocene: The Role of Non-humans in Shaping Animal Welfare Movements.鈥� In Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-human Futures. Edited by Dinesh Wadiwel, Nikki Savvides, Agata Mrva-Montoya, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Chris Degeling, Matthew Chrulew, Madeleine Boyd, and Celeste Black. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 221-242.
• 2015 鈥淲ild Commodities and Environmental Governance: Transforming Lives and Markets in China and Japan.鈥� Conservation and Society. 12(4): 398-407.
• 2014 Global Environmental Winds: Chinese legacies of an ostensibly North American creation. Anthropology and Environment Society. Invited submission. http://www.aaanet.org/sections/ae/index.php/category/engagement-blog/
• 2014 鈥淭ransnational Matsutake Governance: Endangered Species, Contamination, and the Reemergence of Global Commodity Chains for Mapping Shangri-la: Nature, Personhood and Polity in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands. Edited by Chris Coggins and Emily Yeh. Seatte: University of  Washington Press, 153-173.
• 2012 The Politics of Making Biocultural Diversity in China. Rachel Carson Center Perspectives: 37-41.
• 2011 Preliminary Observations on Matsutake Worlds in Yunnan. Edible Fungi of China 3 (Supplement): 114-117. [Also translated into Chinese].
• 2011 鈥淭he Rise and Fall of the Indigenous in Southwest China.鈥� In Anthropology of Extinction: A View to Life on the Brink. Genese Sodikoff, Editor.   Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 103-126.
• 2010 鈥淭he Emergence of Indigeneity: Public Intellectuals and an Indigenous Space in Southwest China.鈥� Cultural Anthropology.
• 2010 鈥淕lobal Environmental Encounters in Southwest China Fleeting Intersections and 鈥楾ransnational Work鈥�.鈥� The Journal of Asian Studies.
• 2009 鈥淧ostcolonial Science Studies and the Making of Matsutake Science in China.鈥� American Ethnologist. 36(2): 393-397.
• 2009 Co-author of chapter, 鈥淪trong Collaboration as a Method for Multi-sited Ethnography: On Mychorrizal Relations.鈥� In Multi-sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis, and Locality in Contemporary Social Research. Mark-Anthony Falzon, Editor. New York: Routledge, 197-214.

• Project: Matsutake Worlds
  Funding: Toyota Foundation
  Involvement: Co-Investigator
  Institution of Co-Investigator(s): Tim Choy (University of California, Davis), Lieba Faier (University of California, Los Angeles), Miyako Inoue (Stanford University), Shiho Satsuka (University of Toronto), Anna Tsing (University of California, Santa Cruz)
• Project: The Emergence of Indigenous Knowledge: Gender, Generation, and Markets in China
  Funding: SSHRC
  Involvement: Principal Investigator