The other female Anthropologist.

While Margaret Mead was doing her ethnographies in Samoa and elsewhere, her friend and colleague, another female student of the famous Franz Boas, was busy coming up with her own theories about cultures and personalities. Ruth Benedict was another female Anthropologist during Mead’s time whose theories wrote themselves into later Anthropology textbooks.

Benedict is most widely known for her book, Patterns and culture, which was published right around the time Mead was conducting ethnographies in New Guinea and debating whether to stay with her second husband or move on to her third.  In this text, Benedict categorized various Native American societies by their personalities. The Kwakiutl were “Dionysian” because they partook in events such as the potlatch, displaying over consumption and excess. Dobuans were “paranoid” and there were the “megalomaniacs”. The Zuni, which she characterized as “Apollonian”, since they appeared “peaceable” and normative.  It’s interesting to note here that the Zunis were the ones with which Benedict did extensive ethnographies with. Benedict’s method of characterizing whole cultures into these personality subgroups in such a way opens up the gates for stereotypes, whether or not they are true or false.  

In her excerpt from The Individual and the Pattern of Culture, Ruth Benedict explains how culture and society come hand in hand with the individual, and it is not possible to separate one from the other. People are molded since birth to reflect the society that they are born into. Additionally, even those that define the cultural normative simultaneously reflect it through their defiance. Benedict was obviously a good student because she uses Boas’s teachings on cultural relativism and expands it to theorize that deviance varies from culture to culture and should therefore deviant individuals should also be studied among cultural groups because it will also give insight into the cultural norms. She gives examples of this through her reference of the Berdache and the menage in Native American tribes. The Berdache were “men-women”, men who wear women’s clothing, and fulfill the gender roles of both men and women. However, instead of being oppressed and marginalized, these men were treated with various degrees of respect, and were favored over regular men. The Berdache can be paralleled to homosexuals in our culture, and it is interesting to note that in our culture, homosexuality is only now starting to be recognized equally and is still a very controversial topic.

All in all, I think that Benedict makes multiple good points in the Pattern of Culture, but her system of categorizing cultures into personalities should be reconsidered.