Ruth Benedict

American anthropologist

• Born: June 5, 1887
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 17, 1948
• Place of death: New York, New York

Depicting culture as an integrated set of traits chosen from the vast range of behavioral possibilities, Benedict directed the focus of American anthropology in the 1930’s and 1940’s toward the search for describable cultural configurations.

Early Life

Two traumatic events, one physical and one psychological, profoundly affected Ruth Benedict as a child. In 1889, Benedict’s father, Frederick Fulton, a gifted homeopathic surgeon, died at the age of thirty-one. His young widow, Beatrice Shattuck Fulton, publicly expressed her immense grief, insisting that twenty-one-month-old Ruth view her father in his coffin, an image that retained potency for Ruth throughout her life. Shortly after her father’s death, she began exhibiting signs of emotional trauma, initially with violent tantrums in which members of her family feared for her safety and that of her sister Margery, and later as she became old enough to check her temper, through bouts of depression. Benedict was emotionally withdrawn as a child, preferring solitude and shunning physical contact. She idolized her dead father and disliked her mother, whose frequently recurring expressions of grief Benedict found appalling. Her traumatic response to her father’s death was exacerbated by substantial hearing loss sustained as a complication from measles. The condition had occurred when she was an infant but was left undiagnosed until she was five years old. Her partial deafness contributed to her surliness and isolation from her family.

During Benedict’s childhood, her mother uprooted her family several times in search of employment before finally settling in Buffalo, New York, where she became head librarian for the Buffalo Public Library. Beatrice Fulton’s pay was relatively low, but the job provided security. Although the family settled in the prosperous upper-middle-class area of the then thriving city, the Fultons were poor in contrast to their neighbors. As scholarship students, Benedict and her sister Margery attended the private St. Margaret’s Academy where they were distressingly aware of their poverty relative to their socially privileged schoolmates.

After attending Vassar on a full scholarship, Benedict sought to balance the desire for public accomplishment with personal satisfaction. She returned to Buffalo after graduation, and for two years she was employed as a social worker. She then moved with her family to California, where she taught school in a private girls’ academy. Both occupations left her unfulfilled and bored. Her marriage in 1914 to Stanley Benedict, a talented young biochemist, and their subsequent move to the New York City suburb of Bedford Hills, left her similarly unsatisfied. Although she wrote poetry, which she published with moderate success under the pseudonym Anne Singleton, and feminist biographies that at the time remained unpublished, she found domestic life and suburban isolation abhorrent. Winter-induced depressions led her to seek external fulfillment, and in 1919, at the age of thirty-one, Benedict enrolled in graduate work at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Later, through the influence of anthropologists Elsie Clews Parsons and Alexander Goldenweiser, she met and convinced Franz Boas of Columbia University to admit her to the doctoral program in anthropology.

Life’s Work

Assisted by Boas’s acceptance of her course work from the New School of Social Research, Ruth Benedict earned her Ph.D. in three semesters. As Boas’s graduate teaching assistant, personal friend, and aide, and later as a lecturer in anthropology, she assumed a progressively significant role at Columbia.

Her 1923 dissertation, “The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America,” was the result of library research rather than fieldwork. While narrow in scope, her study contributed to the knowledge of American Indian religion and myth. Although she took several trips into the field, including excursions made between 1922 and 1926 to study the Serrano, Pima, and Zuni, Benedict’s partial deafness made the collection of oral myths and folk culture difficult. Because she used lip reading to enhance her limited hearing, it was impractical for her to immerse herself in a foreign linguistic tradition, depending instead on interpreters for interviewing informants. Benedict’s forte was interpreting and organizing other anthropologists’ data. Her expertise was most evident in her 1934 publication the now-classic Patterns of Culture , in which she combined her own fieldwork on the Zuni with Boas’s among the Kwakuitl, and Reo Fortune’s among the Melanesian Dobus. Patterns of Culture was the culmination of more than a decade’s ruminations on the definition of culture, including the function of the individual within, and his or her effect on, culture. Furthermore she described the cultural foundations of abnormality.

Benedict’s work reflected what was then a preeminent debate among social scientists about the nature of culture and its effect on the individual. In Patterns of Culture, she rejected biological determinism, which views immutable biological roles as determining human behavior. She also disdained the British-influenced functionalism of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Browne in which every aspect of culture had a particular function that needed only to be deciphered by anthropologists. Instead, Benedict adapted a configurationist approach in which individual cultures select attributes from a “great arc” of possible human behavioral traits. Cultures discard some characteristics while emphasizing others, thereby developing their own identifiable cultural configuration or pattern. The pattern is more than the sum of its parts; instead, it is an integrated whole or a gestalt that can be described by anthropologists. Culture was “personality writ large,” a describable reflection of the psychological group mind. Unlike functionalism, which defined culture as static and ignored history and diffusion as agents of cultural change, Benedict’s patterns were fluid and therefore could be influenced by individuals within cultures.

Within her configurationist approach Benedict also explained deviance, an issue about which she was preoccupied, likely to help her understand her lack of fit in her own culture. While she had always felt herself to be an outsider, Benedict became increasingly aware of her differences as her marriage deteriorated and she attained emotional fulfillment in an intimate and ultimately lesbian relationship with anthropologistMargaret Mead. In Patterns of Culture Benedict emphasized the cultural specificity of abnormality; conduct that is defined as normal in one culture was often considered abnormal in another. Because of the malleability of human beings, the vast majority of members of any culture will conform to dictated behavior. A small percentage, however, will discover that their inborn temperaments or potentialities do not coincide with cultural patterns and will find culture uncongenial, thereby participating in what is culturally defined as abnormal behavior.

Stemming from her belief in the plasticity of human beings, her personal commitment to social reform, and her conviction that anthropologists could be agents of change, Benedict devoted considerable energies to social causes in the form of “applied anthropology.” She became a principal spokesperson against racism with her 1940 publication of the popular Race: Science and Politics . In addition she developed a resource unit on racism with high school teacher Mildred Ellis in 1942, collaborated with a Columbia University committee to write a public affairs pamphlet in 1943, and coauthored a children’s book on racism with anthropologist Gene Weltfish in 1948.

During World War II, Benedict, along with many of her fellow social scientists, worked for government intelligence agencies. In 1943, she joined the Office of War Information (OWI), where she initiated her pioneering work on national character the determination of cultural patterns in complex nations. Since fieldwork was infeasible during the war, she perfected techniques for determining “culture at a distance,” including analysis of films, fiction, propaganda, and interviews with immigrants. Under the auspices of the OWI, she prepared reports on Thailand, Romania, Finland, Norway, Poland, and Italy. The publication of Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946) was the pinnacle of national character studies, profoundly influencing public opinion toward Japan by explaining the foreignness of Japanese culture to the American public.

Benedict’s final contribution to anthropology involved her directorship of Columbia’s ambitious Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC) project, an interdisciplinary program sponsored by the U.S. Navy and begun in 1947 to study national character. The program’s potential was never realized because it ran counter to then-dominant trends in anthropology including movement from interdisciplinary work to specialization; emphasis on quantifiable data in the form of statistics; and distancing from “cultural relativity,” which denied ethical absolutes, claiming cultures could only be judged on their own terms (a position many found untenable in the wake of Nazi Germany’s concentration and death camps). Benedict, weakened by overwork and a postwar trip to Eastern Europe, died of a heart attack on September 17, 1948.

Significance

Benedict’s work in the field of anthropology, while highly influential in the 1930’s, lost prestige in the 1940’s as it went against the grain of the then-dominant tradition among American social scientists. Her work was criticized as impressionistic and too similar to the humanities to be properly scientific. Nevertheless, her popular impact continued. Patterns of Culture continues to be a standard work in anthropology and other classrooms, popularizing anthropological concepts such as cultural relativity and challenging notions of racial superiority and homophobia.

Benedict’s quest for self-fulfillment was a monumental struggle during an era when women’s roles were narrowly proscribed by Victorian social convention. Her battle for professional recognition was similarly a tribute to her persistence in the face of blatant academic discrimination. During the early years after she earned her Ph.D., Benedict, because of her age, was ineligible for grants and fellowships. To achieve professional recognition, she was forced to accept a series of yearly renewable appointments as an unpaid lecturer in anthropology at Columbia. She earned a small salary teaching in the Columbia Extension program and with what little money she could spare supported students’ fieldwork. By the late 1920’s, Benedict was increasingly influential in the anthropology department, but it was not until 1931 that Columbia finally granted her an untenured assistant professorship. Despite these slights and the subsequent decision to choose a less experienced male colleague as chair of the department when Boas retired, Benedict persevered to become one of the most notable women in the field of anthropology.

Bibliography

Banner, Lois W. Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. New York: Knopf, 2003. Based on newly acquired letters and other archival materials, Banner examines the two women’s relationship within the context of their families, friends, husbands, and others in their social circle.

Caffrey, Margaret M. Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989. Caffrey, in this excellent biography, examines Benedict’s life from the perspective of her contribution to American intellectual history and as a “case history in cultural feminism.” Illustrations, footnotes, bibliography.

Lapsley, Hilary. Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Explores the unique kinship between women working in a male-dominated field, and gives a biographical account of Benedict and Mead’s intimate relationship.

Lavender, Catherine J. Scientists and Storytellers: Feminist Anthropologists and the Construction of the American Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Describes how Benedict and three other anthropologists who studied American Indians in the Southwest created a feminist ethnography that emphasized the role of women in Indian culture.

Mead, Margaret. An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. A collection of Benedict’s writings including journal entries, professional publications, and an autobiographical sketch interspersed with biographical essays written by Mead. Fully footnoted with chronology of achievements and bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ruth Benedict. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Again Mead used Benedict’s own writing interspersed with her comments to provide a biographical sketch of Benedict. Included are several publications not found in An Anthropologist at Work.

Modell, Judith Schachter. Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. A detailed biography and analysis of Benedict’s work by anthropologist Modell. Contains citations, full bibliography.

Young, Virginia Heyer. Ruth Benedict: Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Young, one of Benedict’s graduate students, analyzes her teacher’s unpublished and little-known writings, concluding that Benedict was embarking on a new direction in her anthropological studies during the final years of her life.