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To a large degree contemporary anthropology has turned away from the "culture and personality" studies that represented a major trend a generation ago, toward concerns with more "objective" factors in the shaping of culture—the roles of ecology, technology, climate, and the like. In the process, psychoanalytic concepts have played a relatively small role in recent anthropological thought; Totem and Taboo has been written off as a "phylogenetic fantasy," and the universality of the Oedipus complex has been widely challenged, seen as an artifact of the patriarchal culture of 19th-century Europe.
It is refreshing, therefore, to find in the work of Melford Spiro a vigorous reassertion of the value—indeed the necessity—of an appreciation of psychoanalytic ideas for the understanding of cultural phenomena. Spiro, Professor of Anthropology at The University of California, San Diego, has devoted a lifetime of research to the study of family structures and religious institutions in a variety of cultures, particularly in Israel and East Asia. The present volume contains a distillation of his work, in the form of papers prepared for and initially published in various journals and collections, assembled here by two of his former students.
The recurrent theme in these essays, played in many variations, is Spiro's insistence on the existence of what he calls "pan-human" characteristics—universal features of human nature based on man's biological essence—that interdigitate with social and cultural realities to shape personality development and cultural institutions. He rejects the popular notion of culture as an "unmoved mover," the cultural relativism that denies universal, generically human behavioral propensities. Further, in what he calls a "personal observation," he maintains,