Marvin Opler: biography of this anthropologist and social psychologist

Marvin Opler's life can be defined, without any doubt, as passionate and exciting. Since his childhood, he pursued the dream of becoming an anthropologist, for which he always harbored a deep respect for human diversity.

That is why the conflicts of the Second World War, which unfortunately he lived through, awoke in him the unwavering defense of the rights of those who were subjected to the yoke of social injustice. It is a testimony of love for his profession, which still prevails today.

In this Marvin Opler biography We will address the most relevant moments of his professional life, delving into his career as an academic and the work he carried out as an anthropologist, teacher and social psychologist; in a historical context of special convulsion in which he was immersed to the last consequences.

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Brief biography of Marvin Opler

Marvin Opler was a remarkable American anthropologist and social psychologist., born in the city of Buffalo (New York) in the year 1914. He is known for his contribution to the study of stress attributable to the noise of urban life, as well as for his sponsorship of the social aspect of a psychology anchored in the clinical framework.

The figure of his older brother, Morris Opler (also an anthropologist), would be important to him, since he transferred his passion for the study of Apache culture to him when he was just a child.

Next we will review the life and work of Marvin Opler, highlighting his great contribution as an anthropologist to the detailed study of American aboriginal cultures, as well as his social perspective on mental health and his contribution to the knowledge of the experience of Japanese residents in the US during World War II (1939-1945). This historical context is key to understanding the way in which the author projected his legacy and understood the society in which he lived.

Academic training

Marvin Opler He began his studies at the age of 21 in his hometown, Buffalo, but finished at the University of Michigan. He moved there because of his interest in a theoretical convergence of Social Psychology and Anthropology, which in its time was represented by Professor Leslie White, who taught at that place. However, when he earned his degree in social studies, his insatiable thirst for knowledge prompted him to pursue his Ph.D. at Columbia.

It would be precisely at this stage that he would meet Ruth Benedict (president of the American Anthropological Association and a key figure in the study of personality, art and culture) and Ralph Linton (author of classic works such as the Study of Man or the Tree of Culture); and in which he would become a pioneer by performing anthropological studies on various virtually unknown indigenous tribes for western society.

In this sense, they highlight his contributions to knowledge about the Ute (who lived in the areas of present-day Utah and Colorado, although extending their hunting area to the state of Wyoming and the state of Arizona) and the Paiute (who made their homes on the Colorado River and southern Utah), which earned him his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1939.

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Later ethnographic studies

Opler's work as a researcher resorted to the method of social anthropology, that is, ethnography. It is a qualitative design that requires displacement to the physical environments from which the sample, in order to live with the persons of interest and assimilate the uses and customs that are own. It is a participant observation with which to discover and describe cultures other than the one of origin.

With this methodology, he contributed to expanding knowledge about the Apache people (currently distributed throughout Oklahoma, Texas, and Arizona; in a cultural conglomerate in which linguistic and folkloric diversity stands out) and on the indigenous people of the northwestern coasts of Oregon. For this work, among others, he held the Chair of Anthropology at Reed College (a prestigious private university located in southeast Portland).

In the year 1943, at the height of World War II (1939-1945), he was recruited by the American National War Labor Board, a government agency that pursued the purpose of resolving disputes arising as a result of the war (in internal/external affairs of the state). Its creation took place during the term of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this being his second iteration (since the first took place at the end of the First World War and was dissolved in 1919, almost a year after its conclusion).

Work as an anthropologist in Lake Tule

In the years that he was on the National War Labor Board, Marvin Opler he was assigned as a community analyst to Lake Tule (Newel), site where the largest Japanese concentration camp of that time would be built (his brother held the same position in Manzanar).

In these facilities he detained citizens of Japanese descent who resided in the United States during the time that the conflict (despite the fact that they were born there), amounting to approximately 120,000 inmates (most of them from the region continental).

In clear opposition to that of other colleagues, Opler carried out especially critical work with the treatment these citizens received during his long seclusion, recording in detail the life of the place and standing up as a privileged activist for his rights.

At this point he described how many of the Japanese, acculturated for generations by the influx West, recovered some of their ancestral customs in order to restore the dignity that had been given to them. snapped up. This phenomenon was coined as cultural revivalism., and it was one of the phenomena that Opler would document after his experience in the concentration camp.

He also had time to write numerous papers on the implicit effects of racial segregation and even to the emotional crises of the Japanese that motivated his renunciation of an identity as Americans. In all of his writings, he was very critical of the mass incarceration regime that his country was carrying out, alluding to xenophobic reasons and not security ones.

Some of the people who assisted Opler in this endeavor included attorney Wayne Mortimer Collins (a Sacramento native attorney who had previously enrolled in different causes demanding civil rights) and his wife Charlotte (who worked as a nurse in the camp, being the only Caucasian woman who volunteered thereto). He went on to establish strong, lifelong friendships, especially with Japanese who were able to recount his prosocial acts even after his death. In the end they turned out to be artists who fanned the fading flame of Japanese culture after the War.

These activities aroused the suspicion of the FBI, which prompted a detailed investigation into the figure of Opler with the purpose of determining the possible presence of ties to the Communist Party. However, and despite the unfounded accusations of some member of the War Relocation Authority (agency about which the responsibility of locating the Japanese in their respective places of confinement fell), finally they were dismissed.

The persecution of this agency would not end there, as it would return a few years later, although it never resulted in any conviction. It was a sample of the extent to which ideological control of the population was a constant in the United States, even despite claiming to be a land of freedom.

The figure of Opler is considered today as a reference of how the work of the anthropologists who worked in the Lake Tule during those years, since most of them considered the work of confinement that was carried out there justified and ethical. cape. There have been many Japanese thinkers who have extolled the figure of Opler during the last decades, as an extraordinary bastion of the respect for his compatriots in the darkness of that time, rowing against the tide in a troubled era marked by impulses warmongers.

Work in the field of social psychiatry

When all the concentration camps were finally closed and the great war ended, Opler went on to teach at Stanford and Harvard Universities. (for the departments of Anthropology and Sociology). However, it was from 1952 that he began to develop important work related to the area of ​​health. mental health at the Midtown Community Mental Health Research Center. study). He held this post until 1960, publishing his conclusions from the experience a couple of years later.

In his work, aimed at the inhabitants of this area of ​​New York, highlighted the search for individual differences in the expression of schizophrenia attributable to the cultural substrate from the patients; Therefore, his role in the field of health pursued the aspirations that motivated him to study Anthropology as a young man.

Opler died in 1981 of a heart attack, a year after his wife (of who separated in 1970), without actually seeing his latest and most relevant contributions published in this field.

He is remembered as one of the authors who contributed to a greater extent to the development of a Social Psychology, especially as a result of the more than 200 texts that he published during the almost 25 years in which he was a professor at the University of Buffalo (where he began and ended his academic life). He would work there from 1958 until the end of his days, holding the position of Professor of Anthropology for a few years (1969-1972).

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Marvin Opler Research Interest

Marvin Opler published many different works throughout his life, all of them on Anthropology and Social Psychology.

Regarding the first one, he addressed issues such as the acculturation of peoples (loss of popular traditions due to the influence of a foreign culture) or the Ute and Apache rituals (including shamanic analysis of one's dreams, which resembled the method of psychoanalysis without contact with he). He was also interested in the social role of women. and he wrote a lot about his experiences in the Tule Lake concentration camp.

Regarding Social Psychology, was interested in a sociocultural delimitation of mental health, the use of psychoactive substances for ritual purposes, the prevention of psychological disorders and the way in which that international conflicts could contribute to the appearance of problems such as violence and suicide. In this way, he focused his vision of mental health on the social sphere, with works that are still benchmarks in this field today, showing that even in Well-being of this kind is not purely a matter of the proper functioning of the body as an individual entity, but also has to do with what happens in the around.

Bibliographic references:

• Opler, M. (1956). Entities and organization in individual and group behavior - a conceptual framework. Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama, 9(4), 290-300.
• Opler, M. (1941). The Integration of the Sun Dance in Ute Religion. American Anthropologist, 43(4), 551-572.
• Opler, M. (1946). The Creative Role of Shamanism in Mescalero Apache Mythology. Journal of American Folklore, 59, 268-281.
• Opler, M. (1969). International and cultural conflicts affecting mental health. Violence, suicide and withdrawal. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 23(4), 608-620.
• Price, D.H. (2004). Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Price, D.H. & Peace, W.J. (2003). Un-American anthropological thought: The Opler-Meggers exchange. Journal of Anthropological Research, 59(2), pp. 183 - 203.