Melford E. Spiro Books

Spiro challenges the argument of Bronislaw Malinowski that the matrilineal society of the Trobriand Islands produced a psychological constellation -- a matrilineal complex -- different from Freud's Oedipus complex and the generalization regarding the restrictive provenance of the Oepidus complex to which it gave rise. Spiro undertakes a reanalysis of Malinowski's data and shows that there is enough to suggest the presence of a strong Oedipus complex.Melford E. Spiro is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, where he founded the Anthropology Department in 1968. His other works include Gender and Culture, Oedipus in the Trobriands, and Culture and Human Nature.

The current Western interest in Buddhism and other Eastern religions is--among other reasons--both the result of and the stimulation for an entire library of books purporting to bring the Wisdom of the East to an audience for whom the wisdom of the West has failed. This book is not an example of that genre. It is an attempt to interpret Buddhism in the light of some current theories about religion. As a work of scholarship, rather than a homiletic tract or an apologetic treatise, its aim is to understand Buddhism as one historical variant of the generic human attempt to find meaning and hope in a sacred order that transcends the mundane order of existence; its aime is not to encourage or discourage either a devotional or a soteriological interest in Buddhism.