Marvin Opler

Marvin Kaufmann Opler (June 13, 1914 in Buffalo, New York – January 3, 1981) was an American anthropologist and social psychiatrist.

His brother Morris Edward Opler was also an anthropologist who studied the Southern Athabaskan peoples of North America.

Morris and Marvin Opler were the sons of Austrian-born Arthur A. Opler, a merchant, and Fanny Coleman-Hass.

Marvin Opler is best known for his work as a principal investigator in the Midtown Community Mental Health Research Study (New York).

Marvin Opler attended the University at Buffalo from 1931 to 1934.

While there, he was a leader in the University's National Student League.

He then transferred to the University of Michigan, attracted by the reputation of the American anthropologist Leslie White.

Marvin Opler's admiration of White's work was in contrast to that of his brother Morris Opler.

Marvin Opler was interested in the relationships between psychology and anthropology, fields which White had considered connected.

Unfortunately, White was beginning to distance himself from the field of psychology at that time.

Marvin Opler was granted an A.B. in social studies from the University of Michigan in 1935.

After college, he continued his academic career at Columbia University.

There he had the chance to study anthropology under Ruth Benedict and Ralph Linton.

At this time, Opler was conducting some of the earliest anthropological fieldwork among the Southern Utes.

After completing his dissertation on the acculturation of the Ute and Paiute peoples in Colorado and Utah, he was granted a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1938.

In his work with the Ute and Paiute peoples, Marvin Opler noted that Ute and Paiute shamans used techniques of dream analysis that shared features in common with psychoanalysis, although they were developed independently of Western psychiatric practices.

He also did anthropological fieldwork among the Eastern Apache tribes, the Eskimo, and the Northwest Coast Indians in Oregon.

Opler taught sociology and anthropology as the chair of anthropology at Reed College from 1938 until 1943.

In 1943, Marvin Opler was appointed to the War Labor Board.

From 1943 until 1946, Opler worked as a Community Analyst at the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where his critical views of the internment of Japanese Americans later led him to co-author Impounded Peoples in 1946.

While at Tule Lake, he kept careful records of daily camp life.

Opler documented instances of abuse at the camp and worked with lawyer Wayne M. Collins on behalf of the internees.

His records included an account of "The November Incident," a protest by the residents of the camp which resulted in the takeover of Tule Lake by the US Army.

Author Barney Shallit remembered Marvin Opler at Tule Lake both fondly and vividly: "with his heavy red beard and his slow, deliberate movements, he looked ... like a benign, giant panda."

Marvin's wife, Charlotte Opler, enrolled their son Ricky in the Japanese nursery camp at the center, making him the only Caucasian enrolled there.

Marvin Opler also co-authored an article on Senryū folk poetry with another internee, F. Obayashi, which was published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1945.

In his book Threatening Anthropology anthropologist David H. Price discusses FBI documents from 1945 in which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered an FBI investigation of Marvin Opler after the discovery of a letter bearing the initial "M" in a Portland trash can.

Marvin Opler was questioned by the FBI.

One of many anthropologists investigated, the bureau was seeking to discover whether Opler had any Communist Party affiliation.

He responded that the only party he had ever been a member of was the Democratic Party, which he had been involved in up until he moved to Tule Lake.

This landmark study hinted at widespread stresses induced by urban life, as well as contributing to the development of the burgeoning field of social psychiatry in the 1950s.

Marvin Opler noted the parallels between the revival of traditional Japanese culture among the largely acculturated internees at Tule Lake and the spread of the Ghost Dance religion among Plains Indian tribes in the 19th century.

Opler pointed out that both were attempts by the colonized to reassert their dignity.

Historian Peter Suzuki writes that most of the anthropologists who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA) accepted the government's action of interning the Japanese Americans as morally justified.

Suzuki believes, however, that Marvin Opler's work was a model of the positive role that these anthropologists could have played.

Suzuki suggests that Opler's acknowledgment of a wider social and political field as part of his analysis, Opler's criticism of the segregation of so-called "loyal" versus "disloyal" internees, and the respect that Opler paid to Japanese culture made his work such a model.

At Tule Lake, Marvin Opler befriended several well-known Japanese American internees.

One of these was Yamato Ichihashi, one of the first academics of Asian ancestry in the United States.

Ichihashi wrote a comprehensive account of his experiences as an internee.

Opler was impressed by the work of George Tamura, a Japanese American artist who spent his teenage years imprisoned at Tule Lake.