Ruth Benedict is typically introduced with
superlatives. Her books, particularly Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, were immediately popular and continue to sell. She was a prolific writer and, despite her entry into academia later in life, she produced a substantial bibliography. Her participation in the inter-war Columbia University anthropology department, under the tutelage of Franz Boas and in conversation with Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Reo Fortune, among others, placed her in one of the most productive and influential academic communities of the day and within the modern history of anthropology.
Although Benedict and her work can be analyzed in relation to these academic contexts in which she worked, in this project I consider the themes and patterns (dare I say it) of her work, particularly as manifested in her two most popular books: Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Her theoretical orientation towards describing culture as ‘personality-writ-large’ and her commitment to a comparative methodology can be traced through both works. In this web project, I investigate the intersection of cultural patterns, public responsibility, comparative method, cultural relativism, and the culture-as-personality school of anthropological theory, as embodied in the work of Ruth Benedict.
Describing culture through comparison
In a recent edited volume entitled Anthropology, By Comparison, Fox and Gingrich restate the usual criticisms of cultural relativism and the comparative method; as epitomized by Benedict’s work and the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), anthropological comparisons have usually resulted in “monopolistic, universalistic and objectivist claims” (Fox and Gingrich 2002:5). As part of their call for a reconfigured comparative method, Fox and Gingrich quickly summarize the extant dissatisfaction with comparative projects, as epitomized by Benedict’s Patterns of Culture:
“The established mythologies of cross-cultural comparison came to be viewed as especially suspicious because they compared what were assumed to be self-contained, stable, and highly integrated cultures, when the reality was that all local cultures existed within a single worked system integrated by capitalist expansion and absorption” (Fox and Gingrich 2002:2).
The simplifying and totalizing effects of cross cultural comparison are thus, to these authors, incommensurate with current ideas of responsible anthropology.
Ironically, a duty to public responsibility featured prominently in Benedict’s anthropological methods and publications. She worked to make her writing accessible to the non-academic public, intentionally choosing the word ‘pattern’ as her descriptive idiom because she believed this was a word that all readers would understand (contrary to 'paradigm' or 'typology,' for example; Mead 1974:44). Further, Benedict’s constant and implicit comparisons between the cultures she researched and “American culture,” enabled an shorthanded intelligibility of the cultural “other.” For example, when describing the complicated rules of Japanese honor and duty, Benedict repeatedly suggests a similarity with the social rules surrounding American money lending. In one example, she states:
“It is in this ‘circle of giri’ that the parallel with American sanctions on paying money one has borrowed helps us most to understand the Japanese attitude. We do not consider that a man has to pay back the favor of a letter received or a gift given freely or of a timely worked spoken with the stringency that is necessary in keeping up his payments of interest and his repayment of a bank loan. In these financial dealing bankruptcy is the penalty for failure – a heavy penalty. The Japanese, however, regard a man as bankrupt when he fails in repaying giri and every contact in life is likely to incur giri in some way or other” (Benedict 1947:141).
Although such comparisons might make Japanese culture more readily intelligible to an American audience, they are based upon simplistic and totalized representations of both Japanese and American cultural practices; as comparison enables mutual recognition (the Not-Us that enable an awareness of the Us, to use Geertz’s language), it simultaneously flattens both cultural experiences, stripping away social nuances and individuated people. Much like an introductory textbook on anthropology, Benedict’s books might stimulate readers to seek out more cross-cultural interaction, but do so by reifying simplified and totalized images of cultural types.
Yet, Benedict’s style of anthropological engagement, and her links between anthropology, the humanities and psychology, fundamentally shaped the inter-war American anthropology, both within and without the academy.
Caveat: Seeing like a website
This is the first website I have built and also the first detailed biography I have tried to produce. Although I found difficulties in both elements of this project, I hope the unique characteristics of a website will amend the difficulties in writing a biography. Because Ruth Benedict’s life and works have been analyzed multiple times, even by Benedict herself, I found it hard to position myself and my smaller project among the various points of intervention. How did her personal life influence her anthropology? Does her interest in literature and poetry offer insight into her anthropological texts? What role does her academic context play, as well as the professional relationships she cultivated?
Because this project is presented as a website, I have worked to include many links between ideas within the paper, suggesting, I hope, that no one section of her biography should be privileged over the others.