Michael F. Brown

Photo of Michael F. Brown

James N. Lambert '39 Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies, Emeritus

At Williams since 1980

Areas of Expertise

Scholarly interests include the indigenous peoples of North and South
America, magic and religion, human ecology, cultural evolution,
medical anthropology, and dilemmas associated with the protection of
the cultural property of Native peoples worldwide.

Scholarship/Creative Work

Brown is the author of six books, most recently Upriver: The Turbulent Life and Times of an Amazonian People (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Link to complete list of major publications, including downloadable offprints when available.

  • Interview of Michael F. Brown, conducted by Thomas Strong and Jukka Siikala, Suomen Antropologi(Finland, published in English; PDF), 2007.
  • Cultural Relativism 2.0,” Current Anthropology 49(3), 2008. (If you don’t have download privileges through your institutional library, please contact author for full-text copy of article.)
  • Relativismo cultural 2.0.” En: Textos de la antropología contemporánea, Francisco Cruces Villalobos y Beatriz Pérez Galån, compiladores. Madrid: Univ. Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2010.
  • “‘In Defense of Property’: An Exchange.” International Journal of Cultural Property 17: 569-598. Consists of comment by Michael F. Brown (pp. 569-579) and reply by Kristen A. Carpenter, Sonia K. Katyal, and Angela R. Riley (pp. 581-598). Carpenter, Katyal, and Riley’s contribution included with authors’ kind permission.
  • A Tale of Three Buildings: Certifying Virtue in the New Moral Economy.” American Ethnologist 37(4), 2010. (If you don’t have download privileges through your institutional library, please contact author for full-text copy of article.)
  • “Антропологического форума”. Содержание вы можете найти на сайте журнала: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/05/. English version, “Cultural Property, Control of Meaning, and Paths to Recognition,” available here.
  • “Heritage Trouble,” originally published in the International Journal of Cultural Property in 2005, has been reprinted in Croatian in Marijana Hamersak et al,. eds, Proizvodnja bastine: Kriticke studije o nematerijalnoj kulturi, Institut za ethnologiju i folkloristiku, 2013.
  • Upriver: The Turbulent Life and Times of an Amazonian People [provisional title]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming, Fall 2014.