Melford E. Spiro(1920-2014)

Mel Spiro was born in Ohio to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who moved to Minnesota when he was an infant. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Minnesota and (after a period at the Jewish Theological Seminar of New York) a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1950, where he was attracted into the still new field of psychological anthropology by A. Irving Hallowell, a lifelong mentor and friend.(He co-edited a Festschrift to Hallowell in 1965.)

Mel’s career included fieldwork on the Pacific Atoll of Ifaluk, in an Israeli Kibbutz, and in Burma. His teaching career spanned Washington U. and the Universities of Connecticut, Washington, and Chicago before he came to UCSD in 1968 as founding chair of the Department of Anthropology. After arriving in San Diego, Mel received training in psychoanalysis, practiced as a lay analyst, and established medical school links to provide anthropology graduate students with general psychiatric training. Mel was predeceased by his wife, Dr. Audrey Spiro, a specialist in Chinese art history.

Mel was read, respected, and renowned for his careful, insightful, and insistent emphasis upon motivational and psychological underpinnings of human behavior —both conscious and subconscious—and upon the need to take them into account in cross-cultural analysis. Often inspired by insights from psychoanalysis, much of his work focused upon indirectly biological “experiential universals” of human experience (such as infantile helplessness and motherhood only from women) and their inescapable but subtly malleable effects upon culture, including effects on cooperation and aggression.

Mel served terms as president of the American Ethnological Society and the Society for Psychological Anthropology (SPA) and was one of the founders of the SPA’s journal, Ethos. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the recipient of various other academic awards, including two Guggenheim fellowships and an Einstein Fellowship from the Israel Academy of Science. But he was perhaps proudest of an Excellence-in-Teaching award from the Chancellor’s Associates at UCSD, based on his conspicuous concern for and careful mentoring of anthropology graduate students.

Thomas Csordas (Anthropology)

Carol Padden (Dean of Social Sciences)

Former Students

Paula Levin (Education Studies, UCSD)

Douglas Hollan (Anthropology, UCLA)

Alasdair Donald (Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard)

Friends

Katya Newmark

Zena Pearlstone

Joan D. Mosher

Colleagues

Roy D’Andrade (Anthropology)

David Jordan (Anthropology)

Shirley Strum (Anthropology)

David Rudner (Anthropology)

Douglas White (Anthropology)

Alain Cohen (Literature)

Judith M. Hughes (History)

Aaron Cicourel (Sociology)

Family

Jonathan P. Spiro (Castleton College; son)

Program FrontProgram Interior