ABSTRACT
George Spindler began his career in the anthropology of education as part of his graduate training in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1945, immediately after he was mustered out of the army air force. He became an instructor in anthropology for one year in 1947 and transferred to UCLA in the fall of 1948 to work on projective techniques. He pursued there his interests in clinical psychology and sociology, as well as anthropology, as he had at Wisconsin, wrote his dissertation on the Menominee and acquired his Ph.D. there in 1952, after researching and teaching at Stanford for two years. Meanwhile Louise Spindler was acquiring her training in anthropology at Wisconsin, UCLA, and Stanford and acquired her Ph.D. there in 1956, writing her dissertation on Menominee women, the first Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford. George and Louise worked together in all of their fieldwork with Native Americans and overseas in Germany and in Wisconsin in rural schools. Their big passion in life was to live close to nature, as simply as possible. Louise died in 1997 after seven years of increasing debility from emphysema and congestive heart failure, during which she continued to carry on as a professional anthropologist and collaborated with George in teaching, research, and writing. Their years of collaboration are chronicled in Fifty Years of Anthropology and Education—1950–2000 (2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). A briefer account is to be found in “The Four Careers of George and Louise Spindler,” in Annual Review of Anthropology
