Melford Spiro

Lore & Background

Spiro received his B.A. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served 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.

Reader's Guide

Melford Spiro's significance lies in his sustained challenge to dominant trends in late 20th-century American anthropology. He argued against wholesale cultural determinism, radical cultural relativism, and the notion of virtually limitless cultural diversity, insisting instead on the importance of the comparative method and the appreciation of universal cultural and psychological processes. His work integrated psychoanalytic concepts, particularly unconscious desires and beliefs, to explain stability and change in social and cultural systems, especially in family, politics, and religion. Spiro was a key figure in debates over cultural relativism and postmodern theory in the 1980s and early 1990s, consistently defending the value of cross-cultural comparison.

Did You Know?

• Spiro earned his B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1942, majoring in philosophy.
• He worked with both Melville Herskovits and A. Irving Hallowell at Northwestern University, earning his PhD in 1950.
• He received postgraduate training in psychoanalysis at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center and practiced as a lay analyst.
• Spiro was one of the founders of the Society for Psychological Anthropology's journal, Ethos.