Culture and Human Nature

By Melford Spiro and Melford E. Spiro

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560007028
• ISBN13: 9781560007029
• Release Date: February 1994
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 342 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 8.9"

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.