Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer Foundation

Comment by Scott Spicer on April 1, 2009 at 3:51pm

Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer Travel Award
http://www.sfaa.net/spicer/spicer.html

The Spicer Student Travel Fund Awards commemorate the lifelong and very special concern of Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer in furthering the maturation of students in the social sciences, both intellectually and practically, and their lifelong interest in the nature of community as both cause of, and solution to, problems in the human condition. Two awards of $500 each are available to students who meet the eligibility qualifications.

Comment by Scott Spicer on April 2, 2009 at 2:35pm

More info about when Dr. Spicer's career took off (so as not to make the above too long):

For Ned Spicer the 1950s proved to be one of the busiest and most satisfying decades of his life. Not only did he carry forward his involvement with applied anthropology, he also pursued an interest in culture change that in the early 1960s yielded significant contributions to acculturation theory. Additionally, he completed research for a major book concerned with the impact of European civilization on the Indian population of northwest Mexico and the southwestern part of the United States. He also expanded his professional relationships through service from 1951 through 1953 on the Board of Directors of the American Anthropological Association.

At the beginning of the decade, Spicer accepted an invitation from Alexander Leighton to work with John J. Adair of Cornell University in organizing and conducting summer seminars for administrators of overseas agricultural and social science programs, as well as Cornell graduate students in anthropology. The seminars exposed students to the cultures of Indian and Hispanic communities in northern Arizona and New Mexico. Funding for the program came from the Carnegie Corporation.

At Leighton's suggestion, Spicer edited a casebook for use by faculty members and students of the seminar. The Russell Sage Foundation sponsored publication of the casebook under the title Human Problems in Technological Change. It came out in 1952, the same year the last Spicer child, Lawson Alan, was born. By the mid-1960s Human Problems would become a standard text for Peace Corps and Vista volunteers, as well as others working in domestic and international community development programs.

Although Spicer had been interested in culture history and the processes of social and cultural change while doing research in archeology, Human Problems was the first publication after his conversion to social anthropology wherein he gave significant attention to such subjects. In 1941 in a complimentary review of Pascua: A Yaqui Village in Arizona prepared for the American Anthropologist, Ralph L. Beals chided Ned for not doing more historical and comparative research that might have strengthened the study and spared the author certain errors. Whether Beals's criticism had anything to do with a shift in Spicer's orientation will never be known, but after Ned's return to academic life in 1946 his research always included an important historical dimension.

Well before the beginning of World War II, anthropologists had become interested in learning more about social and cultural change. Ralph Linton's 1940 work titled Acculturation in Seven American Indian Tribes gave added stimulus to this research trend. Following a 1953 summer seminar on acculturation, Spicer and several colleagues decided to organize an additional conference on this theme with the aim of designing a research project to explore in greater depth the theoretical and practical aspects of culture change.

The second acculturation seminar, sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, took place on the campus of the University of New Mexico in the summer of 1956. Spicer and five colleagues agreed on a format for a joint study that would describe culture change in six Indian tribes, identify periods when particular change factors prevailed, and characterize the strategies employed by the agents of change as well as those used by tribes in responding to change. From this collaboration came the book Perspectives in American Indian Culture Change, published in 1961.

Spicer provided the introduction to Perspectives as well as a section on Yaqui culture and a final chapter titled "Types of Contact and Processes of Change." Harvard anthropologist Evon Z. Vogt--one of Spicer's associates in preparing the book--commented later that Ned made two important contributions to acculturation theory in Perspectives and his later writings. One was to sharpen the concepts of directed and nondirected culture change, and the other was to focus attention on the social structure of the "contact community" as a major acculturation determinant.

While engaged in research for Perspectives, Spicer continued to collect material for a book he had started on the comparative effects of Spanish, Mexican, and American rule on the Indian cultures of Arizona, New Mexico, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, a region he referred to as the Southwest. His ideas for this volume, as well as the theoretical aspects of Perspectives, provided exciting material for discussion among the graduate students who attended Ned's seminars on culture change, some of which he held in his home.

Comment by Barry R. Bainton on July 25, 2011 at 1:25pm

Thoughts on the Legacy

By Barry Bainton

Ned Spicer was invited to participate in a symposium, organized by Thomas Weaver of the University of Arizona, entitled  "Anthropology in the 1990's: Conditions, Needs, and Prospects." The symposium was held in conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in San Francisco in the winter of 1974. The subheading of the symposium was, "Suppose They Began the Twenty-First Century and Forgot to Invite Anthropology!!!"

Ned presented his paper entitled, "Anthropology in the society of the 1990s", on February 28, 1974.

Twenty years later, in 1994, the paper was republished in Human Organization with a forward by his widow, Rosamond Spicer, under the title, "Reassessing Edward Spicer's Views on Anthropology in the Society of the 1990s: How and Why This Paper by Edward H. Spicer Was Written" (Spicer, Rosamond 1994 Human Organization, Vol. 53. No. 4, pp. 388 - 395). From her forward, we can gain an insight into Ned's thinking and approach to the future.

Rosamond observed that

"In preparing this paper on the future of cultural anthropology, Ned apparently gave it a great deal of thought. As was his habit, he wrote down voluminous notes and lists of ideas. He also made a number of starts, each different from the last.”

“At one point he wrote, 'I react strongly against nineteenth century economic-determinism, that technology and physical environmental conditions are the essential factors to consider in forecasting. I rather look to the future in terms of the adaptation of social structures and cultural orientations to one another in the context of the influence of firm cultural products. I shall therefore take off from consideration of the probable alternative trends which we may expect in the form and functions of societal structures and cultural value orientations.'  “

“Such a point of view was always the basis of his thinking and writing." (p. 388)

In describing Ned, Rosamond says,

"His interests, reading, and studies ranged through drama, literature, economics, city planning, philosophy, history, poetry, the environment, and all the fields of anthropology. All of this vast array of information and understanding he brought to bear in some way or another on any project he undertook, on any subject on which he wrote.”

“Perhaps one of his outstanding characteristics was his ability to synthesize, as was so evident in his Cycles of Conquest. I have long thought that the practice of that art of synthesis was connected with another, the appreciation and writing of poetry. I mention all these aspects of Ned because they seem to be contained in the following paper." (p.388).

 

It was his global interests and ability to synthesize vast amounts of material that I remember from my first graduate classes with Ned.  I was drawn to his Community Development Seminar where  he challenged us to look at the problem at hand from multiple points of view. He asked us, “What are the “felt needs” of the various parties in this change situation?” He encouraged us to seek a synthesis of these views as a way toward understanding the issues and their complexities. As community developers, he taught us that our job was to help the parties to synthesize their shared interests. Our job was to facilitate, not impose, problem resolution.

Ned was a humanist who understood and taught the connection between a people’s past, present and how these shaped their future. In his paper on the February day in 1974, he outlined 5 trends in the social and cultural environment that he felt would shape the next 20 years for anthropology.

The five trends that Ned chose to characterize the society he envisioned for the 1990s were the following:

(1) increasing intercommunication among the peoples of the world;

(2) increasing occupational specialization with accompanying organic differentiation within societies;

(3) increasing failure of technological solutions for the resolution of human problems in acceptable ways;

(4) increasing assertion and self-expression of ethnic groups within nation-states; and

(5) increasing reaction against centralization in political and administrative structures.

He stated "In general, continuation of these trends will, I believe, result in a society more heterogeneous than it was in the 19th or any previous century, more aware of its heterogeneity, with stronger than ever tendencies to compartmentalization, with increased awareness of and interest in non-technological and non-economic factors affecting human life, and with a growing tendency to view the nation-state in a wholly new light, especially with reference to its ethnic components and its political and administrative units." (p. 389)

Now nearly 40 years later, it might be worth considering just how prescient Ned’s predictions were for the 1990s and for the 21st Century.

Was he right?  Partially right? Or, Did he miss the mark?

What are your thoughts? 

Comment by Barry R. Bainton on December 23, 2011 at 9:15pm

What is the Spicer Legacy?

This raises the bigger question -- what is a legacy?

In Edward Spicer's case, it was a combination of students trained with his unique perspective of anthropology as both a science in the pursuit of knowledge about the human condition and a body of knowledge about that condition that could and should be used to bring about a better world.

Second is his body of work, the depth of which has just been scratched. That body of work is to be found first in Spicer's bibliography starting on p.342 and ending on p.350 of James Officer's Memoir of Edward E. Spicer published in the National Academy of Sciences  Biographical Memoirs V.68 (1995) and second his papers located in the Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer Archive at the Arizona State Museum Library. It is from these resources that the legacy resides to be picked up and carried forward by all who hold these values.

Comment by Ted Downing on May 22, 2014 at 2:16am

Nice to read comments about my friend. I don't know how many joint articles Ned did, but I had a wonderful time writing with him on the small outside table in his patio.  Roz and Ned were so nice to my young bride...recalling how they lived in her native Oaxaca when writing Cycles of Conquest. 

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