Editing Cultural anthropology (section)

===Kroeber, Mead, and Benedict===
Boas used his positions at [[Columbia University]] and the [[American Museum of Natural History]] (AMNH) to train and develop multiple generations of students. His first generation of students included [[Alfred Kroeber]], [[Robert Lowie]], [[Edward Sapir]], and [[Ruth Benedict]], who each produced richly detailed studies of indigenous North American cultures. They provided a wealth of details used to attack the theory of a single evolutionary process. Kroeber and Sapir's focus on Native American languages helped establish [[linguistics]] as a truly general science and free it from its historical focus on [[Indo-European languages]].

The publication of [[Alfred Kroeber]]'s textbook ''Anthropology'' (1923) marked a turning point in American anthropology. After three decades of amassing material, Boasians felt a growing urge to generalize. This was most obvious in the 'Culture and Personality' studies carried out by younger Boasians such as [[Margaret Mead]] and [[Ruth Benedict]]. Influenced by psychoanalytic psychologists including [[Sigmund Freud]] and [[Carl Jung]], these authors sought to understand the way that individual personalities were shaped by the wider cultural and social forces in which they grew up.

Though such works as Mead's ''[[Coming of Age in Samoa]]'' (1928) and Benedict's ''[[The Chrysanthemum and the Sword]]'' (1946) remain popular with the American public, Mead and Benedict never had the impact on the discipline of anthropology that some expected. Boas had planned for Ruth Benedict to succeed him as chair of Columbia's anthropology department, but she was sidelined in favor of [[Ralph Linton]],<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/ruthbenedicthuma0000mead|url-access=registration|page=[https://archive.org/details/ruthbenedicthuma0000mead/page/55 55]|quote=Ruth Benedict  Ralph Linton,.|title=Ruth Benedict: A Humanist in Anthropology|last=Mead|first=Margaret|date=2005|publisher=Columbia University Press|isbn=978-0-231-13491-0|language=en}}</ref> and Mead was limited to her offices at the AMNH.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/margaretmeadmaki0000lutk|url-access=registration|quote=margaret Mead.|title=Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon|last=Lutkehaus|first=Nancy|date=2008|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0-691-00941-4|language=en}}</ref>