Harding Ozihel

Melford Spiro Harding Ozihel

Publisher Marketing: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. 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 Micronesia, in Israel, and in Burma (now Myanmar). He was a significant figure in a series of debates over cultural 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.