In Remembrance of Mel Spiro

Melford Elliot “Mel” Spiro (April 26, 1920 – October 18, 2014), was a psychological anthropologist and founder of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. As a scholar and psychoanalyst, Spiro was a key figure who helped forge and shape the field of psychological anthropology.

His interests were eclectic and varied, and his field work led him to cultures around the world: Micronesia, Israeli kibbutzim, North America’s Ojibwa Indian reservations, and Burma. Spiro focused on aggression, childrearing, and especially religion, all through a psychoanalytical lens while immersing himself in the cultures of the regions he researched.

Spiro studied at the University of Minnesota, earning his bachelor’s degree in philosophy, then studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Northwestern University, where he earned his PhD in anthropology in 1950. He taught at many universities, including the University of Chicago, before leaving to found the Department of Anthropology at the burgeoning UC San Diego in 1968.

It was after the move that Spiro went into psychoanalytic training at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Institute and eventually becoming a Research Analyst—as recognized by California law. Spiro relied upon psychoanalytic theory in his work within anthropology, and he wrote many papers on dreams, sexuality, and the Oedipal conflict.

Spiro was also the founder of Ethos, the Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and his enormous body of written works—dozens of books and hundreds of articles—included Burmese Supernaturalism (1968) and Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia (1956). He delved deeply into gender studies with Gender and Culture: Kibbutz Women Revisited (1979) and Gender Ideolo-

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gy and Psychological Reality (1997). He studied anthropology itself, as in the article “Postmodernist Anthropology, Subjectivity, and Science: A Modernist Critique” (Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 38, No. 4, 1996).

Spiro was the president of the American Ethnological Society and a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1982 he became UC San Diego’s first holder of the Presidential Chair. He retired from the university in 1990 but continued to teach there for 15 more years.

Spiro was born in Ohio to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who moved to Minnesota when he was an infant. He was married for 62 years to Audrey Spiro, who earned her PhD in Chinese art at the age of 60 and taught art history for many years at different University of California campuses. She died in 2011. Spiro is survived by his two sons, Michael and Jonathan, both professors, as well as three grandchildren.

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