Culture and Human Nature

This volume illustrates Melford Spiro’s explorations of key relationships among culture, society, and human nature. He addresses such fundamental issues as the limitations of cultural relativism, the problem of explanation in the social sciences, and the importance of a comparative approach to the study of social and cultural systems. Spiro believes that deep motivational and cognitive structures underlie human behavior. He argues that these structures can be explained by the evolutionary history of our species and by social experience.

Melford E. Spiro is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, where he founded the anthropology department in 1968. Among the many books he has published are Anthropological Other or Burmese Brother? and Oedipus in the Trobrtands.