35 pages • 1 hour read
Ruth BenedictPatterns of Culture
Ruth BenedictNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1934A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Culture and Personality
Benedict’s book is a theoretical treatise on culture. Early on, Benedict proclaims that culture is not a biological complex but is learned. It is accumulated knowledge, transmitted across the generations in a process known as enculturation. It also is cohesive. As Benedict famously writes, “A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action” (46). In this regard, Benedict’s theory of culture reproduces the tenets of Boasian anthropology, which privileges a holistic and integrated view of culture. Benedict takes this a step further, though, and questions what brings cohesion and consistency to a culture.
Benedict turns to psychological theories to answer this question. She makes the case that, like personality traits, individuals select cultural traits from an arc of possibilities. It is not entirely clear in Benedict’s analysis how traits are selected. She alludes to historical and environmental considerations without providing many specifics. In this regard, her work departs from the historical particularism that was characteristic of Boas’s research (xxii). Still, Benedict is not deterred from her investigation of cultural cohesion. She explains that as traits are selected and modified, they cohere into a unique cultural configuration (or gestalt) that expresses a dominant personality type or worldview.
This worldview, in turn, patterns the attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs of individuals. A “lack of integration” in cultures is possible (223), and Benedict discusses this idea in the concluding chapters of the book. Such often is the case with marginalized and borderland groups of people who adopt traits from many different traditions. On the whole, though, Benedict devotes her discussion of cultures to the distinctiveness of their patterning. For these reasons, the Zuñi, Dobuans, and Kwakiutl provide ideal case material for portraying culture in its most extreme manifestations as “personality writ large” (xiii).
The extended ethnographic examples of the Zuñi, Dobuans, and Kwakiutl serve another important purpose, too. By studying the cultural configurations of these societies, Benedict emphasizes the internal logic and integrity of all cultures. She demonstrates that the cultural patterns of the Zuñi, Dobuans, and Kwakiutl, while different from our own, are not a random or illogical assortment of customs and traditions. They are intentional and coherent—a perspective that places all cultures, including non-Western ones, on equal footing.
Cultural Relativism
Perhaps Benedict’s greatest contributions to anthropology is her description of cultural relativism and its applications for creating a more tolerant and humane society. Cultural relativism is the view that we should not judge another culture by our own standards but rather view it in its own context. Benedict sustains this idea throughout the book, explaining its relevance for cross-cultural research and using it to support her theory that normality is a relative concept across time and space. What might be considered normal or abnormal in one historical or cultural context might not apply in another.
From a methodological standpoint, a perspective of cultural relativism is helpful for anthropological studies that utilize participant observation. At the time of Benedict’s writing, anthropologists were living in societies very different from their own to collect data about diverse cultural forms. They participated in the daily routines and customs of these societies while also trying to observe them objectively. A perspective of cultural relativism lends greater credibility to this endeavor, for it reduces personal biases and ideas of superiority and inferiority.
Benedict applies a perspective of cultural relativism in her research as well. She emphasizes the unique cultural patterns of the Zuñi, Dobuans, and Kwakiutl but is careful not to frame them in morally judgmental terms. She presents their customs and traditions in a matter-of-fact tone, even when discussing sensationalistic topics, such as human sexuality and homicide.
Benedict turns her discussion of cultural relativism back onto Western society, too. Benedict’s sensitivity to this predicament may reflect her own position of feeling like an outsider (x). She describes the distress and alienation individuals experience when they cannot conform to widely held mores and expectations. She notes that in many cases, pathological descriptions of deviance, like homosexuality, are categorically imposed designations that are not valid in other cultural or historical contexts. She also traces systemic inequities in her society, such as racism, to narrowmindedness and an unwillingness to engage with diverse perspectives and ways of living. Cultural relativism presents the opportunity to counter these trends to create a more inclusive and self-aware society.
Anthropology as a Social Science
One of the aims of Patterns of Culture is to legitimize anthropology as a distinct discipline in the social sciences. It was still a relatively new field in the social sciences, and Benedict takes care to explain its significance as a field of study and to make it accessible to a general audience. At the beginning of the book, she explains what anthropologists study and why it is important to investigate cultures from a holistic and comparative perspective. She argues against evolutionary and speculative theories of human development and, instead, privileges scientific inquiry based on objective observations of human behavior. Benedict’s work thus follows in the scholarly tradition of Boas, yet it also is more humanistic in its approach to studying cultures. Benedict’s literary background and the limitations of her methods help explain this difference.
Benedict draws on the ethnographic fieldwork of other anthropologists to describe the social organization and institutions of the Zuñi, Dobuans, and Kwakiutl. The Zuñi is the only cultural group that Benedict visited as part of her dissertation research in the 1920s, and even in this case, she relies extensively on the research of her former professor Elsie Clews Parsons to deepen her analysis. As a result, much of Benedict’s description of these cultural groups, while meticulously detailed, is based primarily on secondhand accounts, leaving a great deal of room for interpretative analysis. Benedict’s background in literature and folklore studies helps in this regard, as she explicates the meanings of songs, speeches, ceremonies, and myths as well as everyday customs and routines to show the consistent patterns of cultural practices. This humanistic approach prefigures anthropological trends in the 1960s that call for a “thick description” of cultures and employ semiotic, interpretive analyses to better understand the human condition (ix).
Benedict’s discussion of other social science disciplines—such as psychology and sociology—also helps contextualize anthropology as an important and relevant field of study. Benedict’s work is indebted to psychological theories while also showing that anthropology, with its emphasis on cultural relativity, can reshape psychological understandings of deviance and abnormality. Benedict applies the same consideration to the field of sociology, which similarly focuses on social norms. In a world where different cultures and peoples are coming into increasing contact with one another, anthropology offers the opportunity to better understand the human condition in all its diverse forms from a non-judgmental perspective. Benedict’s legitimization of anthropology was a success, as Patterns of Culture became one of the most widely read texts in the social sciences.
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