Benedict, Ruth 1887-1948

BENEDICT, RUTH 1887-1948

Anthropologist

The Role of a Father

When asked about her formative years, Ruth Benedict acknowledged the important role her father had played in her childhood. A homeopathic surgeon whose success was thwarted by illness and who died when she was twenty-one months old, he became in her understanding of his memory a man fascinated with work and research, which she sought to equal. She attended Vassar College and graduated in 1909 after having been exposed to various ideas concerning women's rights, including the rights of women to study and have a profession. In 1914 she married Stanley Rossiter Benedict, a professor of biochemistry. In 1921, after spending eighteen months at the New School, she entered the Ph.D. program at Columbia, where Franz Boas became her mentor. She enjoyed anthropology because of the community of minds she encountered and also for the challenge of creating a space for herself as a woman.

Coming to the Fore

By December 1921 Benedict had presented her first paper at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association. The meticulousness of her investigation of visions in the cultures of the Great Plains Indian tribes impressed the audience, and it was immediately accepted for publication in the association's respected journal. Her chosen byline for it and for her dissertation, finished soon after, was Ruth Fulton Benedict, her maiden and married names combined—a feminist move that raised eyebrows at the time. Despite her early success, throughout the 1920s she jumped from one academic position to another. Thanks to Boas, in June 1931 she became assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University.

The Importance of Culture. In 1934 Benedict published Patterns of Culture, her most popular work of anthropology. Not only did it open new directions in anthropological studies, it also raised new issues and concerns in philosophy and methodology by reintroducing subjectivity, which had previously been rejected in anthropology. The main thrust of her argument was that cultures should be studied as a whole rather than by their specific traits alone. This idea contributed to a split between the "scientific" and "historical" sides of the discipline. Nevertheless, her advocacy of cultural relativism, the idea that unacceptable behavior in one culture might in fact be tolerated or even welcome in another, set the stage for an anthropological focus on culture and the individual. Benedict also worked on issues of racism, striving to dispel racial myths. This also led her to apply some of her conclusions to politics. For example, she suggested in 1943 in her article "Recognition of Cultural Diversities in the Postwar World," published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, that democracy and its practice might be understood and applied differently in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Benedict's Legacy

Besides initiating a culture and personality movement within anthropology, Benedict's Patterns of Culture is also a major work in twentieth-century American intellectual history; it provided a framework of thought in pre-World War II America in which relative statements replaced absolute ones. Her later books, including The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), carried on this legacy. Although her advocacy that each culture is unique and can be measured and understood only on its own terms caused serious controversy in post-World War II American anthropology, some of its associated ideas of dispelling stereotypes and fighting racism remain respected ideals.

Source:

Judith Schachter Modell, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).