Culture and Human Nature

by Spiro, Melford E.; Kilborne, Benjamin; Langness, L. L.

• ISBN13: 9780226769936
• ISBN10: 0226769933
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1987-12-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Transaction Edition Editors' Introduction

Culture and Human Nature

Culture and Human Nature

Some Reflections on Cultural Determinism and Relativism with Special Attention to Emotion and Reason

Preculture and Gender

Is the Oedipus Complex Universal?

Functional Analysis

Social Systems, Personality, and Functional Analysis

Religious Systems as Culturally Constituted Defense Mechanisms

Collective Representations and Mental Representations in Religious Symbol Systems

Religion and Myth

Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation

Virgin Birth, Parthenogenesis, and Physiological Paternity: An Essay in Cultural Interpretation

Whatever Happened to the Id?

Some Reflections on Family and Religion in East Asia

Symbolism and Functionalism in the Anthropological Study of Religion

Index

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