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Melford E. Spiro is a major contemporary figure in the field of anthropology who has kept alive the link between psychoanalysis and anthropology through its vicissitudes over the decades. More broadly, he has stalwartly maintained a commitment to investigating the universals of human nature in the face of what he regards as a blind acceptance of cultural relativism on the part of anthropology as a discipline. His debates with Clifford Geertz over this
issue—whether the anthropological project should be essentially hermeneutic and interpretive, as many anthropologists have argued in increasingly radical ways, or whether anthropology can be a "science" that relies on hypothetico-deductive research strategies, as Spiro maintains—have resounded throughout the discipline. The present volume is a collection of twelve of Spiro's previously published theoretical papers, written between 1961 and 1984, which demonstrate this ongoing concern with the relationship between human universals rooted in individual, precultural needs and the influence of specific cultural processes on human development. It is the first time that Spiro's theoretical papers have been brought together, although several major papers are, unfortunately, missing. Nevertheless, the papers included demonstrate the impressive scope and brilliance of Spiro's thinking.
The book has been organized topically into three sections. The first section, "Culture and Human Nature," includes four of his more recent papers. All of the papers in this section demonstrate, from various angles, the pitfalls of cultural relativism and cultural determinism and the importance of continuing to investigate cross-cultural regularities and human universals. The universals he identifies, such as the oedipus complex and gender identity, are psychoanalytically inspired formulations which he attempts to confirm by showing that even for cultures that would seem least conducive to the expression of these universal dispositions, t