Abstract
Ruth Benedict was one of the most influential anthropological theorists of her generation, best known for her comparative, “socio-psychological” approach to the study of distinctive cultural configurations. The historicized culture concept Benedict elaborated, institutionalized, and popularized, was one she learned from Franz Boas, then America’s foremost anthropologist. In comparative works aimed at a popular audience, Benedict combined science and humanist historical perspectives to undermine dangerous ideas about race and racism. She saw historical knowledge as a tool to combat the idea that racism and conflict were inevitable. She argued, instead, that history and the study of other cultures provided a fuller understanding of human variety and capacity for change. For Benedict, history and culture offered hope for the possibility of creating a different world.
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Notes
- 1.
Ruth Benedict, “Racism is Vulnerable,” The English Journal, 35, no. 6 (Jun., 1946): 299.
- 2.
Benedict published her study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1946), as an attempt to help Americans understand Japanese culture. She undertook the project while working for the Office of War Information toward the end of World War II.
- 3.
George W. Stocking, Jr., “Character as Culture,” New York Times, May 22, 1983, BR 12.
- 4.
Margaret Mead, “Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948),” American Anthropologist, New Series, 51, no. 3 (July–September, 1949): 457–468.
- 5.
The leading biographies of Benedict are: Judith Schachter Modell, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Margaret M. Caffrey, Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989); and Virginia Heyer Young, Ruth Benedict: Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). In addition, there are a number of other texts that explore aspects of Benedict’s life and work, including: Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959); Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict: A Humanist in Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Lois W. Banner, Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Dolores Janiewski and Lois Banner, eds., Reading Benedict/Reading Mead: Feminism, Race, and Imperial Visions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Richard Handler, “Vigorous Male and Aspiring Female: Poetry, Personality, and Culture in Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict,” in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 127–155; and Regna Darnell, And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998).
- 6.
Stocking , “Character as Culture.”
- 7.
Mead , “Ruth Fulton Benedict,” 458; Caffrey, Ruth Benedict, 95.
- 8.
Mead , “Ruth Fulton Benedict,” 458; Caffrey, Ruth Benedict, 101.
- 9.
For more detail on Benedict’s fieldwork, and its limited nature, see: Caffrey, Ruth Benedict; Modell, Ruth Benedict; George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Ethnographic Sensibility in the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 276–341. Benedict’s principal published ethnography was collected by Margaret Mead in An Anthropologist at Work.
- 10.
Caffrey, Ruth Benedict, 103. Data in graph from Caffrey, 270, based on Ruth Landes, “A Woman Anthropologist in Brazil,” in Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences, ed. Peggy Golde (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970), 120, 123, and Virginia Wolf Briscoe, “Ruth Benedict, Anthropological Folklorist,” Journal of American Folklore, 92, no. 366 (October–December 1979): 472.
- 11.
Caffrey, Ruth Benedict, 111–112.
- 12.
Mead , Ruth Benedict, 29.
- 13.
Boas retired from Columbia in 1937 though he remained active in the profession, and died in 1942, aged 84. Boas was the first professor of anthropology at Columbia, appointed to the permanent position in 1899, after spending three years as a lecturer while he worked as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History.
- 14.
David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) and Jonathan Marks, “Race Across the Physical-Cultural Divide in American Anthropology,” in A New History of Anthropology, ed. Henrika Kuklick (New York: Blackwell, 2008).
- 15.
Mead , “Ruth Fulton Benedict,” 458.
- 16.
Vassar Special Collections, Benedict papers, Biographical Note, http://specialcollections.vassar.edu/collections/manuscripts/findingaids/benedict_ruth.html, accessed April 20, 2016. In 1948, Columbia University departments were organized into three divisions, or faculties: Political Science, Philosophy, and Pure Science. The Faculty of Political Science included the departments of Economics, History, Mathematical Statistics, Public Law and Government, and Sociology. See http://guides.library.columbia.edu/uarchives/gsas, accessed December 13, 2017.
- 17.
Modell, Ruth Benedict, 214. Modell notes that TIME magazine remarked, “Dr. Benedict was ‘shocked’ at the small number of women named.” TIME, March 20, 1933, 36.
- 18.
According to the Federal Census for 1946, the average income of non-farm families was about $3000. In 2017, that is equivalent to almost $34,000. “Current Population Reports, Consumer Income,” Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Series P-60, No. 1 Revised, Washington, DC, January 28, 1948.
- 19.
Mead , “Ruth Fulton Benedict,” 457; Caffrey, Ruth Benedict, 337.
- 20.
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture , preface by Margaret Mead, foreword by Louise Lamphere (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), vii–xii.
- 21.
Mead , “Ruth Fulton Benedict,” 460.
- 22.
Benedict, Patterns of Culture, vii.
- 23.
Benedict borrowed the categories “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” from Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. For a discussion of Benedict’s reading of Nietzsche, see Caffrey, Ruth Benedict, 53–58. Caffrey notes that Benedict also was deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Encountered by Benedict as a student at Vassar, Caffrey argues Birth of Tragedy “gave her a framework to understand her past,” and Thus Spake Zarathustra “gave her a sense of freedom from that restrictive past and a purpose for living out her future.” Caffrey also notes that Benedict was deeply influenced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics, “‘the Bible of the student body’” in that era, from which Benedict took lessons about the importance of economic independence for women, as well as a comparative approach to questions of social and biological evolution.
- 24.
Benedict, Patterns of Culture , vii, 46. Mead claimed the idea of “personality writ large” was developed in conversations they had in the winter of 1927–28 about “how a given temperamental approach to living could come to so dominate a culture that all who were born in it would become the willing or unwilling heirs to that view of the world.” Mead , An Anthropologist at Work, 206–212.
- 25.
Stocking , “Ethnographic Sensibility,” 300; Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 17, 37, 249.
- 26.
In a sense, it was Ruth Benedict, and Boas before her, who laid the groundwork for Margaret Mead’s later prominence as a public intellectual proffering an anthropological, cultural critique of American society, and its place in the world.
- 27.
Benedict’s interpretations and conclusions about the Dobu and Zuñi in Patterns of Culture , and of the Japanese in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, have been sharply criticized since her work appeared. See Alfred G. Smith, “The Dionysian Innovation,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 66, no. 2 (April 1964): 251–265; Susanne Kuehling, Dobu: Ethics of Exchange on a Massim Island, Papua New Guinea (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005); Pauline Kent, “Japanese Perceptions of ‘The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,’” Dialectical Anthropology, 24, no. 2 (June 1999): 181–192; Ezra F. Vogel, Foreword, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1989), ix–xii.
- 28.
Clifford Geertz, “US/NOT-US: Benedict’s Travels,” in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 106.
- 29.
Edward Sapir, Language (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1921), 255–257.
- 30.
Matti Bunzl, “Boas, Foucault, and the ‘Native Anthropologist’: Notes Toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 106, no. 3 (September 2004): 435–442.
- 31.
George W. Stocking, Jr., “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 68, no. 4 (August 1966): 867–882.
- 32.
Stocking , “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective,” 877.
- 33.
Richard Handler, “Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture,” American Quarterly, 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 252–273.
- 34.
Tracy Teslow, Constructing Race: The Science of Bodies and Cultures in American Anthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 35.
There is quite a bit of scholarship on Franz Boas’ methodology, and that of his students and other Boasians who followed his lead. For his own statements regarding the foundations of his anthropology, key works include Franz Boas, “The Study of Geography,” Science, 9 (1887): 137–141, reprinted in Race, Language, Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1940); “On Alternating Sounds,” American Anthropologist, 2 (1889): 47–53; and Anthropology: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University in the Series on Science, Philosophy and Art, December 18, 1907 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908). George W. Stocking, Jr., authored the most nuanced analyses of Boasian thought and practice. The most notable of these that explore the historicist method are: “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective”; Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); “Introduction: The Basic Assumptions of Boasian Anthropology,” in A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); and “Ideas and Institutions in American Anthropology: Thoughts Toward a History of the Interwar Years,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). On the German intellectual roots of Boas’ method see Matti Bunzl, “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture,” in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 17–78. Ruth Benedict’s view of Boas and his approach to anthropology can be found in two obituaries she penned: “Franz Boas,” Science, New Series 97, no. 2507 (January 15, 1943): 60–62 and “Franz Boas as an Ethnologist,” Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association, 61 (1943): 27–34. In the mid-twentieth century, with the re-emergence of theorists who advocated finding and describing universals among cultures, Boasian methods came under criticism. Notable among his critics was Murray Wax, who argued that Boas’ “dominant convictions … constricted creative research in anthropology” and limited the development of the field. Murray Wax, “The Limitations of Boas’ Anthropology,” American Anthropologist, New Series 58, no. 1 (February 1956): 63–74.
- 36.
Boas , “Study of Geography,” 642.
- 37.
Bunzl , “Boas, Foucault, and the ‘Native Anthropologist,’” 437.
- 38.
Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Humanities,” American Anthropologist, 50, no. 4, part 1 (October–December 1948), 585–593. Address of Retiring President, American Anthropological Association, December 1947.
- 39.
Benedict, “Anthropology and the Humanities,” 585.
- 40.
Ruth Benedict, Race: Science and Politics , with a foreword by Margaret Mead (New York: Viking Press, 1959 [1940]), vii. Prior to its publication, Benedict’s preferred title for her book was “Race and Racism,” deeming it an accurate representation of her topics and intentions. The editors at Modern Age Books rejected her title, and after extended debate, settled on “Race: Science and Politics,” which Benedict reluctantly accepted.
- 41.
Benedict, Race: Science and Politics, 5.
- 42.
Ruth Benedict to Louis P. Birk, Modern Age Books, October 27, 1939, Folder 51.3, “Race: Science and Politics: Correspondence,” Race: Science and Politics (1940), Series IV, Writings of Ruth Benedict, Benedict Papers.
- 43.
Benedict, Race: Science and Politics, 97.
- 44.
Benedict, Race: Science and Politics, 10.
- 45.
Benedict, Race: Science and Politics, 16–17.
- 46.
Benedict, Race: Science and Politics, 17.
- 47.
Benedict, Race: Science and Politics, 18.
- 48.
Benedict, Race: Science and Politics, 138.
- 49.
For more on Gene Weltfish, see Juliet Niehaus, “Education and Democracy in the Anthropology of Gene Weltfish,” in Visionary Observers: Anthropological Inquiry and Education, ed. Jill B. R. Cherneff and Eve Hochwald (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 87–118.
- 50.
Christopher P. Lehman, The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907–1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 105. The film was for sale in cities around the country, including Boston; Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Connecticut; New York; Baltimore; Atlanta; Tampa; Detroit; Cleveland; Toledo; Cincinnati; Columbus, Ohio; Lexington, Kentucky; Indianapolis; Milwaukee; Racine, Wisconsin; Minneapolis; St. Louis; Kansas City; Wichita; Austin, Texas; Dallas; Houston; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; and Los Angeles. “Points of Service for Brotherhood of Man Throughout the United States,” Folder 76.2, General Subject Files: In Henry’s Backyard, Series X, General Subject Files, Benedict Papers.
- 51.
Ring Lardner, Jr., Maurice Rapf, John Hubley, and Phil Eastman, “‘Brotherhood of Man’: A Script,” Hollywood Quarterly, 1, no. 4 (July 1946): 353–359 [353]; Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, In Henry’s Backyard : The Races of Mankind (New York: Henry Schuman, 1948), n.p.
- 52.
Benedict, Race: Science and Politics, 37–38, 63.
- 53.
The idea of a shrinking world and the humanist notion of a “brotherhood of man” were becoming commonplace in the early 1940s. For example, at the 1944 Social Studies Conference “Diversity Within National Unity,” presided over by Alain Locke, a number of speakers argued for the importance of diverse people realizing they “are truly brothers,” including Carey McWilliams, author of Brothers Under the Skin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), psychologist Otto Klineberg, and Howard E. Wilson, Chair of the Department of Education at Harvard University. Following travels in Britain, the Middle East, Russia, and China, Wendell Willkie wrote the widely read One World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943), an account of his meetings with leaders, citizens, and soldiers, that pressed the common interests of people around the world.
- 54.
Lardner et al., “‘Brotherhood of Man’: A Script,” 354.
- 55.
Benedict and Weltfish, Races of Mankind, 2.
- 56.
Benedict and Weltfish, Races of Mankind, 1.
- 57.
Benedict and Weltfish, Races of Mankind, 2.
- 58.
“Valuable Racial Exhibit,” Hobbies, 49 (March 1944): 22.
- 59.
Benedict, Race: Science and Politics, 15.
- 60.
Otto Klineberg, “Cultural Diversity Within American Unity,” in Diversity Within National Unity: A Symposium, ed. Alain Locke et al. (Washington, DC: The National Council for the Social Sciences, February, 1945), 17–18. Klineberg adapted it from a longer, original version first published by Ralph Linton in The Study of Man: An Introduction (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1936).
- 61.
Benedict and Weltfish, Races of Mankind , 1, 3–4. Benedict noted in Race: Science and Politics, “‘Three’ is not a sacred number” in classifying the major racial divisions, noting that Polynesians “may be a well-marked variant” on the usual triumvirate: Caucasian, Negroid, Mongoloid. Interestingly, Adam and Eve were not illustrated as white, but rather as an intermediate tone, in keeping with Benedict’s and Weltfish’s assertion elsewhere in the pamphlet that most people had an “intermediate” skin tone. This also was implied in In Henry’s Backyard in an illustration of the peopling of the world which begins in central Asia, not in Africa, as it would today, nor in Mesopotamia, given the Adam and Eve genealogy.
- 62.
The Adam and Eve images were copied from Albrecht Dürer’s Garden of Eden engraving, Adam and Eve, 1504. Cranbrook’s image lacks the snake from the biblical narrative, which was included in the pamphlet illustration, although it retained the apple which makes the narrative legible as Adam and Eve. Dürer was an ironic choice, as the Nazis embraced him as a pure Aryan, “the most German of all German artists,” and displayed his self-portrait and art throughout the regime. Jane Campbell Hutchinson, Albrecht Dürer: A Guide to Research (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 15–17.
- 63.
Bunzl , “Boas, Foucault, and the ‘Native Anthropologist,’” 439.
- 64.
Handler , “Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture,” 267, n35. David Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
- 65.
Benedict, “Franz Boas,” 61.
- 66.
Benedict, “Franz Boas,” 61.
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Teslow, T. (2018). Ruth Benedict: An Anthropologist’s Historical Writings. In: Smith, H., Zook, M. (eds) Generations of Women Historians. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77568-5_12
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