Name Morris Opler | Role Anthropologist | |
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Died May 13, 1996, Norman, Oklahoma, United States Education University of Chicago (1930–1933), University at Buffalo (1930), University at Buffalo (1929) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences, US & Canada People also search for Keith H. Basso, William Y. Adams, Chris., Melville J. Herskovits, Leslie Spier Books An Apache life‑way, Childhood and youth in Jicarill, The Character and Deriv, Dirty Boy - a Jicarilla Tale of R, Dirty Boy: A Jicarilla Tale of R | ||
Morris Edward Opler (May 3, 1907 – May 13, 1996), American anthropologist and advocate of Japanese American civil rights, was born in Buffalo, New York. He was the brother of Marvin Opler, an anthropologist and social psychiatrist.
Morris Opler's chief anthropological contribution is in the ethnography of Southern Athabaskan peoples, i.e. the Navajo and Apache, such as the Chiricahua, Mescalero, Lipan, and Jicarilla. His classic work is An Apache Life-Way (1941). He worked with Grenville Goodwin, who was also studying social organization among the Western Apache. After Goodwin's early death, Opler edited a volume of his letters from the field and other papers, published in 1973.
Opler earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1933. He taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon during the 1940s and later taught at Cornell University and the University of Oklahoma.
During World War II, Opler worked as a community analyst at the Manzanar concentration camp, documenting conditions in camp and the daily lives of its Japanese American inmates. Arriving in 1943, he was sympathetic toward the displaced Japanese Americans and frequently butt heads with camp administrators, covering the so-called "Manzanar Riot" and resistance to the unpopular "loyalty questionnaire" and conscription of men from camp.
He also aided the defense of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu in their (unsuccessful) cases challenging the legality of the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, writing an amicus brief for each case that argued the military necessity cited by Western Defense Command head John L. DeWitt was in fact based "on racial grounds."