Editing Ruth Benedict (section)

==Work==
===''Patterns of Culture''===
Benedict's ''Patterns of Culture'' (1934) was translated into fourteen languages and was for years published in many editions and used as standard reading material for anthropology courses in American universities.

The essential idea in ''Patterns of Culture'' is, according to the foreword by Margaret Mead, "her view that human cultures are 'personality writ large.{{Single double}} As Benedict wrote in that book, "A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action." Each culture, she held, chooses from "the great arc of human potentialities" only a few characteristics, which become the leading personality traits of the persons living in that culture. Those traits comprise an interdependent constellation of aesthetics and values in each culture which together add up to a unique [[wikt:gestalt|gestalt]].

For example, she described the emphasis on restraint in [[Puebloan peoples|Pueblo]] cultures of the [[American Southwest]] and the emphasis on abandon in the [[Native Americans in the United States|Native American]] cultures of the [[Great Plains]]. She used the [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzschean]] opposites of [[Apollonian and Dionysian|"Apollonian" and "Dionysian"]] as the stimulus for her thought about these Native American cultures.

She describes how in [[ancient Greece]] the worshipers of [[Apollo]] emphasized order and calm in their celebrations. In contrast, the worshipers of [[Dionysus]], the god of [[wine]], emphasized wildness, abandon, and letting go, like Native American groups living on the Great Plains. She described in detail the contrasts between rituals, beliefs, and personal preferences among people of diverse cultures to show how each culture had a "personality", which was encouraged in each individual.

Other anthropologists of the [[Psychological anthropology#Configurationalist approach|culture and personality school]] also developed those ideas, notably Margaret Mead in her ''[[Coming of Age in Samoa]]'' (published before "Patterns of Culture") and ''Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies'' (published just after Benedict's book came out). Benedict was a senior student of Franz Boas when Mead began to study with them, and they had extensive and reciprocal influence on each other's work. [[Abram Kardiner]] was also affected by these ideas, and in time, the concept of "modal personality" was born: the cluster of traits most commonly thought to be observed in people of any given culture.

Benedict in ''Patterns of Culture'', expresses her belief in [[cultural relativism]]. She desired to show that each culture has its own moral imperatives that can be understood only if one studies that culture as a whole. It was wrong, she felt, to disparage the customs or values of a culture different from one's own. Those customs had a meaning to the people who lived them that should not be dismissed or trivialized. Others should not try to evaluate people by their standards alone. [[Morality]], she argued, was ''relative'' to the values of the culture in which one operated.

As she described the [[Kwakiutl]] of the [[Pacific Northwest]] (based on the fieldwork of her mentor Boas), the Pueblo of [[New Mexico]] (among whom she had direct experience), the nations of the Great Plains, and the [[Dobu Island|Dobu]] culture of [[New Guinea]] (regarding whom she relied upon Mead and [[Reo Fortune]]'s fieldwork), she gave evidence that their values, even where they may seem strange, are intelligible in terms of their own coherent cultural systems and should be understood and respected. That also formed a central argument in her later work on the Japanese following World War II.

Critics have objected to the degree of abstraction and generalization inherent in the "culture and personality" approach. Some have argued that particular patterns that she found may be only a part or a subset of the whole cultures. For example, David Friend Aberle writes that the [[Pueblo people]] may be calm, gentle, and much given to ritual in one mood or set of circumstances, but they may be suspicious, retaliatory, and warlike in other circumstances.

In 1936, she was appointed an [[professor|associate professor]] at [[Columbia University]]. However, Benedict had already assisted in the training and guidance of several Columbia students of anthropology including [[Margaret Mead]] and [[Ruth Landes]].<ref>Smithsonian Institution, Department of Anthropology. Guide to the National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives</ref>

Benedict was among the leading [[cultural anthropology|cultural anthropologists]] who were recruited by the [[Federal government of the United States|US government]] for war-related research and consultation after the US entered [[World War II]].

==="The Races of Mankind"===
One of Benedict's lesser-known works was a pamphlet "The Races of Mankind," which she wrote with her colleague at the Columbia University Department of Anthropology, [[Gene Weltfish]]. The pamphlet was intended for American troops and set forth in simple language with cartoon illustrations the scientific case against racist beliefs.

"The world is shrinking," begin Benedict and Weltfish. "Thirty-four nations are now united in a common cause—victory over [[Axis powers of World War II|Axis]] aggression, the military destruction of [[fascism]]."

The nations united against [[fascism]], they continue, include "the most different physical types of men."

The writers explicate, in section after section, their best evidence for human equality. They want to encourage all types of people to join and not fight among themselves. "[A]ll the peoples of the earth," they point out, "are a single family and have a common origin." We all have just so many teeth, so many molars, just so many little bones and muscles, and so we can have come from only one set of ancestors, no matter what our color, the shape of our head, the texture of our hair. "The races of mankind are what the [[Bible]] says they are—brothers. In their bodies is the record of their brotherhood."<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Benedict |first1=Ruth |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=27VflLFp0rwC |title=The Races of Mankind |last2=Weltfish |first2=Gene |date=1943 |pages=5 |language=en}}</ref>

===''The Chrysanthemum and the Sword''===
{{Main|The Chrysanthemum and the Sword}}
{{See also|Guilt-Shame-Fear spectrum of cultures}}
Benedict is known not only for her earlier ''Patterns of Culture'' but also for her later book ''The Chrysanthemum and the Sword'', the study of the society and culture of [[Japan]] that she published in 1946, incorporating results of her wartime research.

This book is an instance of ''anthropology at a distance''. The study of a culture through its [[literature]], newspaper clippings, films and recordings, etc. was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its [[Allies of World War II|allies]] during World War II. Unable to visit [[Nazi Germany]] or Japan under [[Hirohito]], anthropologists used the cultural materials to produce studies at a distance. They attempted to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression and hoped to find possible weaknesses or means of [[persuasion]] that had been missed.

Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding [[Japanese culture]], which had matters that Americans found themselves unable to comprehend. For instance, Americans considered it quite natural for American [[prisoners-of-war]] to want their families to know they were alive and to keep quiet when asked for information about troop movements, etc. However, Japanese prisoners-of-war apparently gave information freely and did not try to contact their families. Why was that? Why, too, did Asian peoples neither treat the Japanese as their liberators from Western [[colonialism]] nor accept their own supposedly-just place in a hierarchy that had Japanese at the top?

Benedict played a major role in grasping the place of the [[Emperor of Japan]] in [[Japanese popular culture]], and formulating the recommendation to US President [[Franklin Roosevelt]] that permitting continuation of the Emperor's reign had to be part of the eventual surrender offer.

Japanese who read this work, according to Margaret Mead, found it on the whole accurate but somewhat "moralistic." Sections of the book were mentioned in [[Takeo Doi]]'s book, ''[[The Anatomy of Dependence]]'', but Doi is highly critical of Benedict's concept that Japan has a [[Guilt-Shame-Fear spectrum of cultures|"shame" culture]], whose emphasis is on how one's moral conduct appears to outsiders in contradistinction to the Christian American "guilt" culture in which the emphasis is on the individual's internal conscience. Doi considered that claim to imply clearly that the former value system is inferior to the latter one.