1887-1948
One of the major figures in the development of American cultural anthropology, Ruth Benedict was educated at Vassar College (AB, 1909) and Columbia University (PhD, 1923), where she studied under the American anthropologist Franz Boas. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Boas and his students mounted an attack on social-evolutionary theories of human history. Boasian anthropologists showed that the evolutionists’ hypothesis of universal stages of development ("primitive," "barbarian," "civilized") were belied by historical facts, especially by the diffusion of cultural materials and the movements of people. That people borrowed language and culture from one another meant that no group of people, and no cultural whole or stage, had an identity that remained fixed over time. But this concept left open the question of what Benedict came to call "cultural integration." Given that cultures were ceaselessly changing, how were anthropologists to talk about the coherence that people experienced in their life-worlds? Benedict’s two masterworks, Patterns of Culture (1934) and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), provide elegant answers to that question.
Benedict begins Patterns by pointing out that because the possibilities for a viable way of life are almost limitless, "selection" becomes a "prime necessity" of human history (p. 23). A group of people creates, borrows, and selects materials that it "integrates" into a consistent pattern, a cultural totality. In Benedict’s approach, the meaning of any item that has been incorporated into the whole depends upon its place within that whole; over time, disparate culture traits are woven together in a fundamental pattern such that any one of them can be understood only in terms of its relationship to all the others. Moreover, because cultural wholes are patterns of values in terms of which humans understand the world, people tend to understand (and misunderstand) other cultures by interpreting them in terms of their own. There is, therefore, a tension in Benedict’s anthropology between scientifically authoritative descriptions of integrated cultural patterns and ironic reflections on the way Western cultural values structure her readers’ (and her own) understandings of other cultures.
This tension is exemplified in Chrysanthemum, a book that came out of Benedict’s work analyzing cultures for the United States government during World War II. Chrysanthemum begins with a discussion of Japanese conceptions of hierarchy and indebtedness, for these contradict the crucial American values of equality and freedom. For example, because Japanese understand family relationships as grounded in indebtedness, they accept both filial and parental duties that to Americans seem overly severe and lacking in love. Similarly, civic duty in Japan is understood as repayment of debt to the supreme authority at the apex of the social hierarchy (the emperor). A person’s self-respect is bound to his fulfillment of such duties. By contrast, American self-respect depends on freedom, hence Americans tend to view governmental regulation as a violation of their dearest values—leading Japanese to find Americans to be lawless. Each culture misunderstands the other because apparently similar traits take on different significances in each.
As her study of Japan illustrates, Benedict believed that anthropology, by helping people to see their culture in a new light, could lead them to change customs that were no longer useful or humane. But such reforms were not to be imposed by force; rather, they should emerge, Benedict thought, from democratic discussion, both nationally and internationally. Benedict herself was willing to assert strong value judgments in her work, as, for example, in her critique of the obstacles women of her time and milieu experienced trying to balance family and career (a balance that was difficult for her to achieve, as her biographers make clear). Moreover, the work of Benedict and other anthropologists on the Japanese (carried out while Japanese Americans were being placed in internment camps) has come to seem problematic to historians and anthropologists who, since Vietnam, have become increasingly dubious that social science in the service of political power can promote democratic ends. Yet, as American difficulties in places like Iraq at the turn of the twenty-first century make clear, there is a place for the kind of anthropologically informed understanding of other cultures that Benedict did so much to advance. It is no surprise, therefore, that a New York Times essay on the rebuilding of Iraq concludes with the question, "Where are the new Ruth Benedicts?"
