Culture and Human Nature

By Melford Spiro and Melford E. Spiro

Book Overview

One of the most prominent figures in psychoanalytic and psychological anthropology, Melford E. Spiro has produced an oeuvre of broad theoretical and ethnographic scope. One of the few anthropologists who are also trained in psychoanalysis, he has made the study of culture and personality a distinctive theoretical approach to anthropological work and has been a consistent and forceful critic of such popular intellectual movements as structuralism, hermeneutics, cultural determinism, and symbolic anthropology. This volume of Spiro's major theoretical writings concentrates on theories of culture and human nature, functional analysis, and religion. Spiro argues that important dimensions of the human family are the same everywhere and that a theory of human nature is both possible and necessary. He discusses religious beliefs, analyzing not only their structures but also the ways such beliefs are held and the meanings attributed to them. This analysis, Spiro shows, can be done most successfully by means of a theory of the human family, of infant and child development and socialization, of panhuman unconscious processes, and of universal psychodynamic constellations such as the Oedipus complex.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226769933
• ISBN13: 9780226769936
• Release Date: November 1987
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Culture and Human Nature

The content of this book is self-explanatory, as revealed by the title. The reason I ranked this book as five-star is not because its detailed and comprehensive researches on how different cultures (which is one, but not only, critical element about human behaviors and thinking according to the book) affecting human nature. Instead, it's the AUTHOR'S THINING STYLES AND PROCESSES that impress me most. The author explcitly, and skillfully, articulates how he came up with each idea in the book. This makes me, as a reader, feel that I was having a face-to-face conversation with the author when reading. The author analyzed his own thinking processes like an open book(just an analogy here, don't take it literally hehe), like a psychology surgeon dissecting his own thoughts. Also, the readers may not only benefit from the concrete knowledge from the book, but also, more importantly, from improving the readers own thinking abilities by modelling the author's. I would say this book can be viewed as a reasoning guide book as well.