Michael Eugene Harkin

Wishing Mike and his family a peaceful transition as he journeys into a new world, remembering all the love and joy he offered while in this world.

Mike was a man of few words, but often those words were insightful and usually had a smidge of humor.

Thank you for sharing your time with so many of us. You will be missed dearly! 🤍

~Mel

My deepest condolences for this loss. Michael was an amazing friend and scholar, a person of many talents and deep feeling. As I reflect upon a friendship of nearly three decades, my heart goes out to Alison, Caroline, James and William. I’m a better person for having known Michael and grateful for his friendship.

May you rest in eternal peace, Michael. You were one of my very first friends from our early days at UNC. I always admired your intelligence, your dedication and your kindness.
God bless you and your family. You will be missed.

As a friend of over fifty years, I can attest to the fact that all of these things said of Michael are true, without exaggeration. In addition to experiencing his kindness, intellect and humor, first hand, I always learned something new from Michael every time we interacted. Even in his passing, the poem, “Masonboro” shared here, contains a nugget of insight that I previously had no word for. The poem refers to the uninhabited barrier island across the Intracoastal Waterway from the Wilmington, NC home his family relocated to from Chapel Hill, and where I got to spend time with him while he was a student at UNC. His use of ‘palimpsest’ not only unlocks the meaning of the poem, I think, but provides a word for a concept I previously had no word for. Thank you, again, Michael, for another lesson. In addition to your humor and kindness, your modest brilliance will be greatly missed.

My deepest condolences to Michael’s family. I have admired Michael since we met in graduate school at the University of Chicago. He will be remembered among anthropologists for his brilliant ethnographic and ethnohistorical work, and among his friends for his kindness, compassion, and modesty. He will be deeply missed.

Michael was a great friend and colleaugue. He will be missed. Condolences to the family.

I am so sorry to learn of Michael’s passing. My condolences to Allison and their children. Grief is the price we pay for love, but we are honored to have experienced our time together. Michael was a joy and a gift.

Karen Luckritz Fogelson

My deepest condolences to Michael’s family, friends and colleagues. I first met Michael in the 1980s – we both did our doctoral work in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Over the years we organized panels at scholarly conferences, edited special journal issues and several books. Michael was a wonderful colleague: extremely erudite yet modest. He was a great colleague and friend and the two of us spent many hours talking, joking, drinking and just enjoying life. I will miss him very much but I’m grateful that I had an opportunity to meet and get to know him so well. rest in peace, dear friend!

My deepest sympathies to Michael’s family. He was a mentor and a friend who will be sorely missed. We enjoyed many laughs, but still too few.

Michael was a wonderful colleague and collaborator, and a firm and fine friend. He was always so full of wit and insight and life, it is shocking to think he is gone so soon, way too soon. I shall really miss him. My heartfelt condolences to his family. RIP, old friend.

My sincere condolences to you Allison and the children. I do remember my stay at your home in 2005. Michael was a great colleague and a good friend. We also had a great time bi in Luberon with Sergei Kan when we work together on the edition of our book,
Coming to shore.
Marie Mauzé

Sorry for your loss Harkin family.

Allison, I’m so sorry to read of Michael’s passing. I remember great conversation with him , when you took me in for the night in Bozeman way back in 1991, and my deepest condolences are with you and your family.

In the seminar room at the University of Wyoming, Mike Harkin did not simply teach anthropology. He performed it. He sat among the ten of us on a chair where the tables were arranged in a quadrilateral, facing one another as doctoral seminars are meant to be. He was not a partisan of any single theory. He was a generous host to a century of grand ideas. He’d speak with equal fluency and affection about Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss, about Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. He did not pit them against one another; he let them converse across the decades, across the page, across the lectern. In that graduate seminar on 20th Century Anthropological Thought, he taught us the most difficult and necessary lesson of all: that true intelligence is not the ability to choose a side, but the capacity to hold two opposing thoughts in the mind at once, to honor their tension, and to refuse the lazy comfort of intellectual certainty.
He was a walking encyclopedia, but never a pedant. His knowledge was not a shield; it was a door. He opened it for us and invited us in. We felt the architecture of structuralism rise around us, its symmetrical beams and ordered spaces, a cathedral of classification. And then we felt the weight of Derrida’s deconstruction press upon that very architecture, exposing its fault lines, its hidden hierarchies, its suppressed contradictions. We learned to see the structure and to see through it at the same time. We emerged not as disciples of any single school, but as broadened minds, because Mike had shown us that the richest intellectual life is the one that refuses to be imprisoned by its own preferences.
His lecture hall was not the only place where his generosity bloomed. After my doctoral years, he remained a regular presence in my professional life, a true collaborator and a dear friend. I invited him three times to lecture my MBA students of brand management at Hult in San Francisco, where he brought his anthropological might to bear on the entropic world of consumerism, identity, and meaning.
Even after his illustrious career at the University of Wyoming, when he went to work for a water company, we stayed in touch. The distance never mattered. We wrote book chapters together across thousands of miles—he in New Zealand, I in New York. Our hour long video conferences, conducted in the small hours of our respective time zones, were among the great joys of my career. He loved folk-rock: the Grateful Dead, Leonard Cohen, Fairport Convention. I introduced him to noise rock: Sonic Youth and the Pixies. In that small exchange, the pattern repeated itself: the melodic and the dissonant, the structured and the chaotic, held together in one friendship. He never dismissed what he did not already love.
He was kind in the way that only the truly wise can be. He was funny in the way that only those who have stared into the abyss of theory can still find the humor in a good story. He loved to travel, but he loved his Laramie. Despite the nine months of ice and snow, he would claim that the three summer months were picture postcard perfect.
Mike’s passing leaves a wound in my life that I fear will remain open until I die. That is the simple truth of what it means to lose a teacher who became a friend, a mentor who became a brother of the mind. I will carry his voice with me into every classroom I enter. I will hear him in my own lectures when I try to hold two opposing thoughts at once. I will see him in the architecture of structuralism and in the wreckage of deconstruction. I will feel him in the folk melodies of Siege and Leif and in the noise chords of Daydream Nation. I will remember that the most beautiful thing we can do with our minds is to open them to everything, and to close them on nothing. I will remember him. I will miss him. I will miss him forever.

My sincere condolences. Michael was one of the best and he’ll be deeply missed by friends and colleagues. A very special man who combined kindness and compassion with wit, humor, and an erudite level of insight. I hope the many wonderful memories bring some solace to his loved ones.
Rest well, Michael.

I’m so sorry to learn of Michael’s passing, he was such a lovely person. We met through the Newberry Library and remained friends since that time. I always liked seeing him at conferences and catching up. I’ll miss his wit and insightfulness. My deepest condolences to his family. – Scott