Patterns of Culture Benedict's
Patterns of Culture (1934) was translated into fourteen languages and was for years published in many editions and used as standard reading material for anthropology courses in American universities. The essential idea in
Patterns of Culture is, according to the foreword by Margaret Mead, "her view that human cultures are 'personality writ large. As Benedict wrote in that book, "A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action." Each culture, she held, 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. Those traits comprise an interdependent constellation of aesthetics and values in each culture which together add up to a unique
gestalt. 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 used the
Nietzschean opposites of
"Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as the stimulus for her thought about these Native American cultures. She describes how in
ancient Greece the worshipers of
Apollo emphasized order and calm in their celebrations. In contrast, the worshipers of
Dionysus, the god of
wine, emphasized wildness, abandon, and letting go, like Native American groups living on the Great Plains. She described in detail the contrasts between rituals, beliefs, and personal preferences among people of diverse cultures to show how each culture had a "personality", which was encouraged in each individual. Other anthropologists of the
culture and personality school also developed those ideas, notably Margaret Mead in her
Coming of Age in Samoa (published before "Patterns of Culture") and
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (published just after Benedict's book came out). Benedict was a senior student of Franz Boas when Mead began to study with them, and they had extensive and reciprocal influence on each other's work.
Abram Kardiner was also 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. It was wrong, she felt, to disparage the customs or values of a culture different from one's own. Those customs had a meaning to the people who lived them that should not be dismissed or trivialized. Others should not try to evaluate people by their standards alone.
Morality, she argued, was
relative to the values of the culture in which one operated. As she described the
Kwakiutl of the
Pacific Northwest (based on the fieldwork of her mentor Boas), the Pueblo of
New Mexico (among whom she had direct experience), the nations of the Great Plains, and the
Dobu culture of
New Guinea (regarding whom she relied upon Mead and
Reo Fortune's fieldwork), she gave evidence that their values, even where they may seem strange, are intelligible in terms of their own coherent cultural systems and should be understood and respected. That also formed a central argument in her later work on the Japanese following World War II. Critics have objected to the degree of abstraction and generalization inherent in the "culture and personality" approach. Some have argued that particular patterns that she found may be only a part or a subset of the whole cultures. For example, David Friend Aberle writes that the
Pueblo people may be calm, gentle, and much given to ritual in one mood or set of circumstances, but they may be suspicious, retaliatory, and warlike in other circumstances. In 1936, she was appointed an
associate professor at
Columbia University. However, Benedict had already assisted in the training and guidance of several Columbia students of anthropology including
Margaret Mead and
Ruth Landes. Benedict was among the leading
cultural anthropologists who were recruited by the
US government for war-related research and consultation after the US entered
World War II.
"The Races of Mankind" One of Benedict's 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 pamphlet was intended for American troops and set forth in simple language with cartoon illustrations the scientific case against racist beliefs. "The world is shrinking," begin Benedict and Weltfish. "Thirty-four nations are now united in a common cause—victory over
Axis aggression, the military destruction of
fascism." The nations united against
fascism, they continue, include "the most different physical types of men." The writers explicate, in section after section, their best evidence for human equality. They want to encourage all types of people to join and not fight among themselves. "[A]ll the peoples of the earth," they point out, "are a single family and have a common origin." We all have just so many teeth, so many molars, just so many little bones and muscles, and so we can have come from only one set of ancestors, no matter what our color, the shape of our head, the texture of our hair. "The races of mankind are what the
Bible says they are—brothers. In their bodies is the record of their brotherhood."
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 wartime research. This book is an instance of
anthropology at a distance. The study of a culture through its
literature, newspaper clippings, films and recordings, etc. was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its
allies during World War II. Unable to visit
Nazi Germany or Japan under
Hirohito, anthropologists used the cultural materials to produce studies at a distance. They attempted to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression and hoped to find possible weaknesses or means of
persuasion that had been missed. Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding
Japanese culture, which had matters that Americans found themselves unable to comprehend. For instance, Americans considered it quite natural for American
prisoners-of-war to want their families to know they were alive and to keep quiet when asked for information about troop movements, etc. However, Japanese prisoners-of-war apparently gave information freely and did not try to contact their families. Why was that? Why, too, did Asian peoples neither treat the Japanese as their liberators from Western
colonialism nor accept their own supposedly-just place in a hierarchy that had Japanese at the top? Benedict played a major role in grasping the place of the
Emperor of Japan in
Japanese popular culture, and formulating the recommendation to US President
Franklin Roosevelt that permitting continuation of the Emperor's reign had to be part of the eventual surrender offer. Japanese who read this work, according to Margaret Mead, found it on the whole accurate but somewhat "moralistic." Sections of the book were mentioned in
Takeo Doi's book,
The Anatomy of Dependence, but Doi is highly critical of Benedict's concept that Japan has a
"shame" culture, whose emphasis is on how one's moral conduct appears to outsiders in contradistinction to the Christian American "guilt" culture in which the emphasis is on the individual's internal conscience. Doi considered that claim to imply clearly that the former value system is inferior to the latter one. ==Legacy==