Melford Spiro

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Melford Elliot Spiro (born April 26, 1920) is an American cultural anthropologist specializing in psychological anthropology. He is known for his work on the Westermarck effect, and for his studies of the kibbutz. He has conducted fieldwork among the Ojibwa, on Ifaluk atoll in the South Pacific, in Israel, and in Burma (now Myanmar). He was a significant figure in a series of debates over relativism and postmodern theory among American cultural anthropologists in the 1980s and early 1990s, in which he consistently argued for the importance of the comparative method and the appreciation of universal psychological processes, especially child development and unconscious drives. He is also trained as a lay psychoanalyst.

He began his undergraduate career at Northwestern University in philosophy, but soon decided that the empirical and comparative methods of cultural anthropology provided a better approach to answering his questions about human nature. He received his B.A. in anthropology, working with Melville Herskovits, and continued on to graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania with A. Irving Hallowell. He received his Ph.D. in 1950. He later taught at Harvard University and was invited to found the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California, in the early 1970s. He has been professor emeritus there since the 1990s. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.).

[edit] References

Darnell, Regna (2006) "Keeping the Faith: A Legacy of Native American Ethnography, Ethnohistory, and Psychology." In: New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations, ed. by Sergei A. Kan and Pauline Turner Strong, pp. 3-16. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Kilborne, Benjamin, and L.L. Langness, eds. (1987) Culture and human nature: Theoretical papers of Melford E. Spiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[edit] Select Bibliography

Spiro, Melford E. (1984) "Some Reflections on Cultural Determinism and Relativism with Special Reference to Emotion and Reason." Pp. 323-346 in Culture Theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion, edited by R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Spiro, Melford E. (1987) "Religious systems as culturally constituted defense mechanisms." Pp. 145-160 in Culture and human nature: theoretical papers of Melford E. Spiro, edited by B. Kilborne and L. L. Langness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Spiro, Melford E. (1992) "On the strange and familiar in recent anthropological thought." Pp. 53-70 in Anthropological Other or Burmese Brother? edited by M. E. Spiro. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press.
Spiro, Melford E. (1993) "Is the Western conception of the self "peculiar" within the context of the world cultures?" Ethos 21:107 - 153.
Kilborne, Benjamin, and L.L. Langness, eds. (1987) Culture and human nature: Theoretical papers of Melford E. Spiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.