In Remembrance: Michael Moerman ’64PhD Died on August 22 2020

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Michael Moerman, a professor emeritus of anthropology at UCLA, died on August 22, 2020, in San Francisco.

Moerman was born in 1934 in the Bronx. He received his BA with Distinction from Columbia College in 1956, and his PhD in anthropology from Yale University in 1964. He had a long career at UCLA (1964–92), where he had dual specialties: Thai culture and sociolinguistics. 

In his early career he specialized in the culture of the Thai-Lue minority in northern Thailand, and he lived in Thailand for six years. His work included Agricultural Change and Peasant Choice in a Thai Village (1968), and numerous articles on Thai and Thai-Lue rituals, agriculture, kinship, and ethnicity. Later in his career he became an expert in sociolinguistics, uniting the fields of ethnography with conversation analysis, and published the seminal work Talking Culture (1988), which received numerous honors, and was esteemed as “the first attempt by an ethnographer to apply tools of conversation analysis to conversational data from a non-Western language and culture in a monograph-length work” (Niko Besnier, 1990 book review). Moerman also taught courses in ethnographic film at the UCLA film school. 

After retirement, he pursued a new career in acting and dramaturgy: from 1994 to 2019 he performed in countless theatrical productions throughout California, and provided dramaturge’s notes for the Foothill Theatre Company, Boxcar Theatre, and many others. He specialized in performing Shakespeare, including numerous performances at the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival. One of the highlights of his acting career was performing as Mentor in the We Players outdoor production of the Odyssey on Angel Island near San Francisco. He was also an accomplished amateur ceramicist and a decades-long student and practitioner of Zen Buddhism and meditation. 

He was known for his intense charisma, gregarious wit, and ability to instantly charm a room of strangers in any corner of the world, even in languages he barely knew. He is survived by his wife, Patricia Miller; his sister, Sharon Grodner; his three children: Maxine Moerman, Max Moerman, and Ben Moerman; two stepchildren, Erik Painter and Kirsten Painter; and seven grandchildren.

—Submitted by the family.