Anthropologist, born in New York City, New York, USA. She studied at Vassar College, then earned a PhD in anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia University, where she joined the faculty and assisted Boas (192348). Although deafness limited her fieldwork, she was recognized as America's leading anthropologist after Boas' retirement. Her Patterns of Culture (1934) was a classic statement of cultural relativity and one of the most influential modern works of anthropology. In it she argued for cultural determinism. Analysing three Indian tribes in archetypal terms, she concluded that cultures are personalities writ large, and that psychological normality is culturally defined. Her Zuñi Mythology (1935) and Race (1940), an anthropologically based denunciation of racism, developed these themes. In her wartime work for the Bureau of Overseas Intelligence (19436), she initiated an innovative method of applying anthropological techniques to the study of foreign cultures, developing a series of national character studies that bore fruit in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), an analysis of Japanese culture. In this effort, she worked closely with Margaret Mead, who wrote an important study of her friend, An Anthropologist at Work (1959).
Ruth Benedict (born Ruth Fulton, June 6, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist.
She was born in New York, and attended Vassar College, graduating in 1909.
Franz Boas, her teacher and mentor, has been called the father of American anthropology and his point of view can be seen in his student's, Ruth Fulton Benedict.
Patterns of Culture
Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) was translated into fourteen languages and was published in many editions as standard reading for anthropology courses in American universities for years.
The essential idea in Patterns of Culture is, according to Margaret Mead, "her view of human cultures as 'personality writ large.'" Each culture, Benedict explains, 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. For example she described the emphasis on restraint in Pueblo cultures of the American southwest, and the emphasis on abandon in the Native American cultures of the Great Plains. She described in detail the contrasts between rituals, beliefs, personal preferences amongst people of diverse cultures to show how each culture had a "personality" that was encouraged in each individual.
Other anthropologists of the personality and culture school followed through on these ideas--notably Margaret Mead in her Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. Abram Kardiner was 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.
As she described the Kwakiutls of the Northwest Coast, the Pueblos of New Mexico, the nations of the Great Plains, and the Dobu culture of New Guinea, she gave evidence that their values, even where they disagree with the values of the anthropology student who is reading Patterns of Culture, belong to coherent cultural systems and should be respected.
Whatever ethical imperatives have since been described by anthropologists as universal, not culture-bound, Benedict's work as a pioneer in describing whole cultures, and as an advocate of cross-cultural equality, has lived.
Critics have argued that particular patterns she found may only be a part, a subset, of the whole cultures.
In 1936 she was appointed an associate professor at Columbia University.
Benedict was among the leading social anthropologists who were recruited by the U.S. Government for war-related research and consultation after U.S. entry into World War II.
One of her 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 Races of Mankind
"The world is shrinking" begin Benedict and Weltfish.
The nations united against fascism, they continue, include the most different physical types of men."
And the writers explicate, in section after section, the best evidence they knew for human equality.
Environment has to do with our physical traits.
But whatever our physical traits, regardless of the shape or size of our head, we are equally intelligent.
Environment has more to do with intelligence than birth does, including how much money is spent on schools.
Not only is the intelligence of people the same, on the whole, but the blood has the same chemical composition.
And all people are of mixed race, produced by "the movements of peoples over the face of the earth...since before history began."
This knowledge, and more, was intended to work against superiority--the superiority "a man claims when he says, 'I was born a member of a superior race.'....Racial prejudice," writes the authors, "makes people ruthless."
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
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 war-time research.
This book is an instance of Anthropology at a Distance. Study of a culture through its literature, through newspaper clippings, through films and recordings, etc., was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its allies in World War II.
Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding Japanese culture;
Americans found themselves unable to comprehend matters in Japanese culture.
Benedict played a major role in grasping the place of the Emperor of Japan in Japanese popular culture, and formulating the recommendation to President Franklin D.
While one critic has written that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is "long since... discredited since Benedict had no direct experience in Japan" and described it as "considered shallow and overtly racist", the Japanese ambassador to Pakistan stated this in a public address:
In 1946, Ruth Benedict, a well-known American cultural anthropologist, published a book on Japan entitled “The Chrysanthemum and The Sword”, which has been a must reading for many students of Japanese studies.Other Japanese who have read this work, according to Margaret Mead, found it on the whole accurate but somewhat "moralistic."
It is still generally regarded as a classic whose value continues even despite the post-war changes in Japanese culture.
Post-War
She continued her teaching after the war, advancing to the rank of full professor only two months before her death, and died in New York on September 17, 1948.
A U.S. postage stamp in her honor was issued October 20, 1995.
Additional Note
A building at SUNY Stony Brook University, named Benedict College is named after both Ruth Benedict and her achievements in the field.
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