Honoring Professor Emeritus Michael Agar

It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing away of Professor Emeritus Michael Agar on the morning of May 20, 2017 after a courageous struggle with ALS.

Michael H. Agar was born in Chicago in 1945. He considered his hometown to be Livermore, California, where his family relocated in 1956. Professor Agar graduated from Stanford with a degree in anthropology in 1967. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Professor Agar accepted a commission in the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service during graduate school. He taught at several universities, foreign and domestic, including the University of Vienna and the Intercultural Management Institute at the Kepler University in Linz.

Professor Agar taught in the Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland for more than a decade and he was one of the major foundations in creating the Master of Applied Anthropology program. His ethnography courses were always popular and many of his books have been lauded as groundbreaking ethnographies. His book Professional Stranger is read widely and is a required reading in many graduate programs.

Some of his other books include: Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation, Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs, and Independents Declared: The Dilemmas of Independent Trucking. Most recently, he self-published: The Lively Science: Remodeling Human Social Research. He was in the process of writing another book and the draft of chapters 1-7 is posted on his web page: http://www.ethknoworks.com/index.htm

He retired from the Department of Anthropology in the Fall of 1996 as an Emeritus faculty. Professor Agar developed a consulting company known as Ethnoworks LLC based in Northern New Mexico where he continued to do important ethnographic work. He had a large intellectual presence in the Department of Anthropology and has left a lasting impression on many anthropologists in the field. We mourn the loss of a cherished colleague, teacher, mentor and friend.

Professor Agar is survived by wife, Ellen Taylor; his sister, Mary, and brother, Tom; and by numerous nieces, nephews and their children.

Learn more about Professor Agar and memorials, here: http://redfish.com/mikeAgar.html

Published on Thu, 05/25/2017 - 09:24