1930's Science and Technology | Patterns of Culture

Nonfiction work

By: Ruth Benedict

Date: 1934

Source: Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934. Reprint, with a new preface by Margaret Mead, 1959, 45–47.

About the Author: Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948), born in New York, received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1923. She began teaching at that institution the following year, and was appointed its Director of Anthropology in 1936. In 1941, Benedict became a founding member of the Institute for Intercultural Studies. At the time of her death she was in the midst of a four-year Contemporary Cultures Project for Columbia, which involved more than 120 participants studying seven divergent cultures.

Introduction

Anthropology developed in nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. Its practitioners were men of European ancestry who regarded Western...