[Geertz is an American anthropologist whose numerous works focus on the cultures of Indonesian countries and reflect a method of study that combines various disciplines—including history, philosophy, psychology, and literary criticism—to analyse cultural structures and phenomena. Describing himself as an "interpretive social scientist," he is considered one of the most important figures in contemporary anthropology. In the following essay, Geertz examines Benedict's prose style, beginning with a passage from her essay "The Uses of Cannibalism. 'I

We have done scant justice to the reasonableness of cannibalism. There are in fact so many and such excellent motives possible to it that mankind has never been able to fit all of them into one universal scheme, and has accordingly contrived various diverse and contradictory systems the better to display its virtues.

The present decade, indeed, is likely to appreciate to an unusual degree the advantages that attach to cannibalism so soon as the matter may be presented. We have already had recourse to many quaint primitive customs our fathers believed outmoded by the progress of mankind. We have watched the dependence of great nations upon the old device of the pogrom. We have seen the rise of demagogues, and even in those countries we consider lost in a morally dangerous idealism we have watched death dealt out to those who harbor the mildest private opinions. Even in our own country we have come to the point of shooting in the back that familiar harmless annoyance, the strike picketer. It is strange that we have overlooked cannibalism.

Mankind has for many thousands of years conducted experiments in the eating of human flesh, and has not found it wanting. Especially it has been proved to foster the feeling of solidarity within the group and of antipathy toward the alien, providing an incomparable means of gratifying with deep emotion the hatred of one's enemy. Indeed, all the noblest emotions have been found not only compatible with it, but reinforced by its practice. It would appear that we have rediscovered that specific and sovereign remedy for which we have long perceived statesmen to be groping.…

It is necessary first to place beyond doubt the high moral sentiments with which the custom has been allied. It has been unfortunate that in our solicitude lest heroism, endurance, and selfcontrol should perish from a world so largely devoted to commerce and the pursuit of wealth, we should have overlooked the matter of cannibalism. Certain valiant tribes of the Great Lakes and the prairies long ago made use of it to this purpose. It was to them their supreme gesture of homage to human excellence. It is told by old travelers that of three enemies whose death made the occasion for such a celebration of their valor, two were eaten with honor, while the one remaining was passed over untouched. For at death, this one had marked himself a coward, and cried out under torture.…

This is of course not the only excellent ethical use to which cannibalism has been put among the peoples of the world. There are tribes to whom it is an expression of tenderness to the most nearly related dead so as to dispose of their discarded bodies—a supreme cherishing of those for whom there can be no other remaining act of tenderness.…

Cannibalism has proved also to be extraordinarily well qualified to provide the excitement of an ultimate aggression. This has proved recently to be by no means the frivolous subject that it may appear. Indeed we have been confronted by the problem on such a large scale that, in the interests of progress, it is difficult not to press the matter. Without the infantile ostentations and unfortunate appeals to the hatred of one's fellow being which characterize our Black Shirts and our Red Shirts, the Indians of Vancouver Island found a heightened excitation, disciplined in endless ritual and taboo, in a ceremonial show of cannibalism … When it was time for [an aristocrat] to become a member of [a secret] society, he retired to the forests or the graveyard, and it was said that the spirits had taken him. Here an almost mummified corpse was prepared and smoked, and at the appointed time, in the midst of great excitement, the noble youth returned to the village with the Spirit of the Cannibal upon him. A member of the society carried the corpse before him, while with violent rhythms and trembling of his tense body, he rendered in dance his seeking for human flesh. He was held by his neck-ring that he might not attack the people, and he uttered a terrible reiterated cannibal cry. But when he had bitten the corpse, the ecstasy left him, and he was "tamed." …

It is obvious that nothing could be more harmless to the community; one useless body per year satisfactorily satisfied the craving for violence which we have clumsily supplied in modern times in the form of oaths, blood-and-thunder, and vows to undertake the death of industrious households.…

All these uses of cannibalism are, however, of small moment in comparison [to]… its service in the cause of patriotism. Nothing, we are well aware, will so hold in check the hostile elements of a nation as a common purpose of revenge. This may be raised to a high degree of utility by various well-known phrases and figures of oratory which picture our determination to "drink the blood of our enemies." It has however been held essential that we pursue this end by the death, in great numbers and with distressing tortures, of young men in sound health and vigor. Nothing could show more lamentably our ignorance of previous human experiments. It is this aspect of cannibalism that has appealed most widely to the human species; it has enabled them to derive the most intense emotional satisfaction from the death, even the accidental death, of one solitary enemy, allowing them to taste revenge in a thoroughgoing and convincing manner, ministering to their faith in his extirpation, root and branch, body and soul.…

The Maoris of New Zealand [for example] before the feast, took from their enemies the exquisitely tattooed heads which were their incomparable pride, and setting them on posts about them, taunted them after this fashion:

"You thought to flee, ha? But my power over-took you.

You were cooked; you were made food for my mouth.
Where is your father? He is cooked.
Where is your brother? He is eaten.
Where is your wife? There she sits, a wife for me!"

No one who is familiar with the breakdown of emotional satisfaction in warfare as it is recorded in postwar literature of our time can fail to see in all this a hopeful device for the reestablishment of an emotional complex which shows every sign of disintegration among us. It is obvious that something must be done, and no suggestion seems more hopeful than this drawn from the Maoris of New Zealand.

The serviceability of cannibalism is therefore well established. In view of the fact that ends now so widely sought in modern war and its aftermaths can thus be attained by the comparatively innocent method of cannibalism, is it not desirable that we consider seriously the possibility of substituting the one for the other before we become involved in another national propaganda? Our well-proved methods of publicity give us a new assurance in the adoption even of unfamiliar programs; where we might at one time well have doubted the possibility of popularizing a practice so unused, we can now venture more boldly. While there is yet time, shall we not choose deliberately between war and cannibalism?

This modest proposal, written about 1925 when Ruth Benedict was, though nearing 40, at the very beginning of her career, and published only out of her Nachlass by (who else?) Margaret Mead more than a quarter of a century later, displays the defining characteristics of virtually all her prose: passion, distance, directness, and a relentlessness so complete as to very nearly match that of the giant who is here her model. She did not have Swift's wit, nor the furor of his hatred, and, her cases before her, she did not need his inventiveness. But she had his fixity of purpose and its severity as well.

This vein of iron in Benedict's work, the determined candor of her style, has not, I think, always been sufficiently appreciated. In part, this is perhaps because she was a woman, and women, even professional women, have not been thought inclined to the mordant (though the example of that other Vassarite, Mary McCarthy, might have worked against such an idea). In part it is perhaps a result of the fact that she wrote a fair amount of rather soft-focus lyric poetry and tended to begin and end her works with onward and upward sermons somewhat discontinuous with what the body of the work actually conveyed. And perhaps most of all it has been a result of a conflation of her with the larger-than-life Mead—her student, friend, colleague, and in the end custodian ("proprietor" might be a better term) of her reputation—from whom she could hardly be, on the page, more unlike. But whatever the reason, Benedict's temper, as both her followers and her critics for the most part conceive it—intuitive, gauzy, sanguine, and romantic—is at odds with that displayed in her texts.

The connection with Swift, and beyond him with that highly special mode of social critique of which he is in English the acknowledged master, rests on more than this particular piece of self-conscious impersonation, which may have been written as much to blow off steam as anything else. It rests on Benedict's use, over and over again, from the beginning of her career to its end, and virtually to the exclusion of any other, of the rhetorical strategy upon which that mode of critique centrally depends: the juxtaposition of the all-too-familiar and the wildly exotic in such a way that they change places. In her work as in Swift's (and that of others who have worked in this tradition—Montesquieu, Veblen, Erving Goffman, and a fair number of novelists), the culturally at hand is made odd and arbitrary, the culturally distant, logical and straightforward. Our own forms of life become strange customs of a strange people: those in some far-off land, real or imagined, become expectable behavior given the circumstances. There confounds Here. The Not-us (or Not-U.S.) unnerves the Us.

This strategy of portraying the alien as the familiar with the signs changed is most often referred to as satire. But the term is at once too broad and too narrow. Too broad, because there are other sorts of literary mockery—Martial's, Moliere's and James Thurber's. Too narrow, because neither derision nor extravagant humor is necessarily involved. Every so often there is a sardonic remark, very dry and very quiet—"[Zuni] folktales always relate of good men their unwillingness to take office—though they always take it." "Why voluntarily hang yourself from hooks or concentrate on your navel, or never spend your capital?" But the pervading tone in Benedict's works is one of high seriousness and no ridicule at all. Her style is indeed comedic, in the sense that its purpose is the subversion of human pretension, and its attitude is worldly; but it is so in a deadly earnest way. Her ironies are all sincere.

The intrinsically humorous effects that arise from conjoining the beliefs and practices of one's most immediate readers to those of African witches and Indian medicine men (or, as our excerpt shows, of cannibals) are indeed very great; so great that Benedict's success in suppressing them in the works that made her famous, Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, both of which are organized from beginning to end in a look-unto-ourselves-as-we-would-look-unto-others manner, is the foundation of her achievement as an author-writer "founder of discursivity." "Self-nativising," to invent a general term for this sort of thing, produces cultural horselaughter so naturally and so easily, and has been so consistently thus used, from "Des cannibales," Lettres persanes, and Candide to The Mikado, The Theory of the Leisure Class, and Henderson the Rain King (to say nothing of intramural japes like Horace Miner's "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," or Thomas Gladwin's "Latency and the Equine Subconscious"), that it seems built into the very thing itself. To get it out so as to change parody into portraiture, social sarcasm into moral pleading, as Benedict did, is to work very much against the tropological grain.

It is also to perfect a genre, edificatory ethnography, anthropology designed to improve, that is normally botched either by moral posturing (as in The Mountain People [by C. Turnbull]), by exaggerated self-consciousness (as in New Lives for Old [by Margaret Mead]), or by ideological parti pris (as in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society [by E. Banfield]). The reality of Zuni equanimity or Japanese shamefacedness aside, issues by now pretty well moot, this is a remarkable accomplishment. But what is even more remarkable, it is an accomplishment that arises not out of field work, of which Benedict did little and that indifferent, nor out of systematic theorizing, in which she was scarcely interested. It arises almost entirely out of the development of a powerful expository style at once spare, assured, lapidary, and above all resolute: definite views, definitely expressed. "[A] wood-cut page from an old 15th century Book of Hours," she wrote in her journal, perhaps sometime in the 1920's, "with its honest limitation to the nature of the wood it worked in, can give us a quality of pleasure which the superfluous craftsmanship of [the late nineteenth, early twentieth century white-line wood engraver] Timothy Cole can never touch. And a dozen lines of an etching by Rembrandt, each line bitten visibly into the metal, conjures up a joy and a sense of finality that the whole 19th century does not communicate."

So with words.

So indeed, when words, like wood and metal, are there to begin with. Benedict's style, as she herself as a professional anthropologist, was born adult. It was already in being, more or less in perfected form, in the early specialized studies through which she earned her, once it began, extraordinarily rapid entry to the discipline—and to the institutional center of it, Columbia's commanding heights, at that. The later works, upon which her wider reputation rests, the first published at 47, the second at 59, two years before her death, simply deploy it on a larger scale in a grander manner.

It had, of course, a kind of prehistory in her college writing, in some abortive fragments of feminist biography quickly abandoned when she turned to anthropology, and (though the nature of its relevance is normally misconceived) in her poetry. But as ethnography, her style was invariant from beginning to end: incised lines, bitten with finality.

From 1922:

The Indians of the Plains share with the tribes to the east and west an inordinate pursuit of the vision. Even certain highly formalized conceptions relating to it are found on the Atlantic Coast and on the Pacific. Thus, in spite of all diversity of local rulings, the approach to the vision was, or might always be, through isolation and self-mortification. More formally still, the vision, over immense territories, ran by a formula according to which some animal or bird or voice appeared to the suppliant and talked with him, describing the power he bestowed on him, and giving him songs, mementoes, taboos, and perhaps involved ceremonial procedure. Henceforth for this individual this thing that had thus spoken with him at this time became his "guardian spirit."

From 1934:

The Zuni are a ceremonious people, a people who value sobriety and inoffensiveness above all other virtues. Their interest is centered upon the rich and complex ceremonial life. Their cults of the masked gods, of healing, of the sun, of the sacred fetishes, of war, of the dead, are formal and established bodies of ritual with priestly officials and calendric observances. No field of activity competes with ritual for foremost place in their attention.

From 1946:

Any attempt to understand the Japanese must begin with their version of what it means to "take one's proper station." Their reliance upon order and hierarchy and our faith in freedom and equality are poles apart and it is hard for us to give hierarchy its just due as a possible social mechanism. Japan's confidence in hierarchy is basic in her whole notion of man's relation to the State and it is only by describing some of their national institutions like the family, the State, religious and economic life that it is possible for us to understand their view of life.

Whatever this sort of writing is, it is all of a piece: the same thing said and resaid until it seems either as undeniable as the laws of motion or as cooked up as a lawyer's brief; only the examples change. This hedgehog air of hers of being a truth-teller with only one truth to tell, but that one fundamental—the Plains Indians are ecstatic, the Zuni are ceremonious, the Japanese are hierarchical (and we are, always, otherwise)—is what so divides Benedict's professional readers into those who regard her work as magisterial and those who find it monomaniac. It is also what brought her such an enormous popular audience. Unlike Mead, who achieved a somewhat similar result with a loose-limbed, improvisational style, saying seventeen things at once and marvelously adaptable to the passing thought, white-line curlicuing if ever there was such, Benedict found herself a public by sticking determinedly to the point.

The work in which this unlikely meeting of an aesthetic mind, rather at odds with the world around it, and a pragmatic mass audience, casting about for useful knowledge, first occurred is, of course, Patterns of Culture. Brief, vivid, and superbly organized, the book, which has sold nearly two million copies in more than two dozen languages, clearly struck a chord, rang a bell, and sent a message. The right text at the right time.

The literary form of the work is at once so simple, so compact, and so sharply outlined, that it has proved more or less impossible even for those most maddened by it ever to forget it. A conjunction of a triadic descriptive scheme (three wildly contrasting tribal cultures), a dichotomous conceptual typology (two drastically opposed sorts of human temperament), and a unitary governing metaphor (alternative life-ways selected from a universal "arc" of available possibilities), its composition could hardly be more elementary, its structure more overt. Like Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (though that was in four parts, and had Proportion for a metaphor), it stays in the mind.

Benedict's Houyhnhnms, Brobdingnagians, and Yahoos—the Zuni, the Kwakiutl, and the Dobu—provide a frame for her text that is not so much narrational (plotted tales imposing an explanatory logic on a train of events) as presentational (thematic set-pieces imposing a moral coloration on a system of practices). Patterns of Culture was not written to be cited. No one goes to it, and I doubt anyone ever much did, despite the overheated "Is it really so?" debates which arose around it, to settle factual issues about Pueblo, Northwest Coast, or Melanesian social life. (Two of her three cases were, of course, unconnected with any field research of hers. And even in the one with respect to which she did have some firsthand knowledge, she was not, given the highly circumscribed nature of her Zuni work, herself an important source of the material she reviewed.) Benedict trafficked, not only here but just about everywhere in her work, not in description (there is virtually nothing, folktales aside, of which she is the primary recorder) but in a distinctive sort of redescription: the sort that startles. Her real-life Luggnaggs and Lilliputs are, like the fictional ones, primarily meant to disconcert.

And so they surely do, either because they reproach us as the Zuni do (Why can we not be thus cooperative?), caricature us as the Kwakiutl do (Is not gaining status by setting fire to slaves but conspicuous waste writ conspicuously large?), or accuse us as the Dobu do (Do we not, too, half believe that "the good man, the successful man, is he who has cheated another of his place"?). The whole enterprise, three chapters absolutely crammed with detailed material of the most curious sort—Zuni passage rites, Kwakiutl chants, Dobu residence arrangements—has the air, the same one that remorseless descriptions of Blefuscu judicial procedures or Laputian linguistics have, of being concerned with something else, and somewhere else, rather closer to home. The whole thing is done with a progression of pointed contrasts in which the constant opposing term, the one that is pointed at, is—a reminding allusion now and then aside—eloquently absent. Not mere allegory, deep meanings secreted within Aesopean fables, but negative-space writing. What is there, bold and definite, constructs what isn't: our cannibal face.

Around this dominant trope—extravagant otherness as self-critique, we have met the Not-us and they are notUs—are gathered, in the five short thesis-driving chapters that bracket the three long ethnographic ones, the more obvious and more mechanical Apollonian/Dionysian and arc-of-selection images. They are supposed, these clanking metaphors, to make the point fully explicit. But it is one of the ironies that haunt Benedict's work, along with the misassimilation of it to that of Mead and the misconception of it as documentational, that they have served in the event mainly to obscure it. Sometimes, less is more. Trying too hard to be clear, as someone who had been a poet ought to have known, can dim an argument best left oblique.

Benedict's Apollonian/Dionysian contrast—"[He who] keeps the middle of the road, stays within the known map" vs. "[He who] seeks to … escape from the bounds imposed on him by his five senses, to break through into another order of experience"—is taken, of course, though not with much else, from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. The arc-of-selection metaphor is taken, also with not much else, from phonology—"In cultural life as it is in speech, selection [from the inventory of physically available possibilities] is the prime necessity"—and capsulated in the famous Digger Indian proverb that serves as epigraph to the book: "In the beginning God gave to every people a cup of clay and from this cup they drank their life." Between them, these two figures, the one of temperamental extremes, radically incommensurable, the other of a range of choices, mutually exclusive, are designed to rescue the ethnographic material from its radical particularity; to make what is singular in its description general in its implications. Science through poetry—the study of "primitive civilizations" is to be the foundation for an analysis of culture as exact as biology:

The understanding we need of our own cultural processes can most economically be arrived at by a detour. When the historical relations of human beings and their immediate forbears in the animal kingdom were too involved to use in establishing the fact of biological evolution, Darwin made use instead of the structure of beetles, and the process, which in the complex physical organization of the human is confused, in the simpler material was transparent in its cogency. It is the same in the study of cultural mechanisms. We need all the enlightenment we can obtain from the study of thought and behavior as it is organized in the less complicated groups.

This sorting out of beetles (a surprising image for a scholar so humanistically oriented to choose) leads however not to a narrativist representation of cultural variation of the sort one would expect from an anthropological Darwin, a historical story with a scientific plot, but to an attempt to construct a catalog of genres, cultural kinds appropriately named. Benedict is not really after "processes" or "mechanisms" (nor—some generalized remarks, more hortatory than analytical, about "integration" and "abnormality" aside—does she offer any); rather she seeks, once again, ways of making difference tell. The problem is that, in promising otherwise, she seems to have insured herself of being understood as testing out a theory when what she really was doing (and knew that she was doing) was pressing home a critique: "The recognition of cultural relativity," the famous—or infamous—last paragraph of the book runs,

carries with it its own values… It challenges customary opinions and causes those who have been bred to them acute discomfort. It rouses pessimism because it throws old formulae into confusion.… [But as] soon as the new opinion is embraced as customary belief, it will be another trusted bulwark of the good life. We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.

That someone so intent to disturb should so represent herself as engaged in constructing a table raisonnee of human possibilities is mainly to be accounted for by the intellectual environment in which she worked, but to which, coming late and with a metaphorical turn of mind, she never quite properly belonged. Between the wars, the conception of anthropology as uniquely positioned to find out the essentials of social life that are disguised or covered over in complex, modern societies reached perhaps its greatest peak, though it of course existed before in Durkheim ("les formes élémentaires") and has hung on after in Levi-Strauss ("les structures élémentaires"). Franz Boas, Paul Radin, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, and Edward Sapir in the United States, Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, A. C. Haddon, and C. C. Seligman in Britain all shared it and the image of primitive societies as "natural laboratories," anthropology's Galapagos, that went with it. But it fits ill with the view of such societies as funhouse mirrorings—this one elongated, that one squashed, the other twisted—of our own that was at the imaginative center of Benedict's sensibility.

The attempt to be (or anyway to look like) a "real scientist," as that beatifical state was then conceived, is what led to the two-bucket typology, the curveless arc, and to that disastrous final sentence about "equally valid patterns of life," which, as Elgin Williams pointed out years ago, contradicts everything that is conveyed by the substance of the book. In time, she at least half realized this and pulled herself free of methodological conceits she did not believe to produce (one unfortunate—and again, unfortunately memorable—chapter aside) the book most surely her own, and, though it has sold "only" 350,000 copies, the most certainly lasting: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

The Western Imagination, to the degree one can talk intelligibly about such a vast and elusive entity at all, has tended to construct rather different representations for itself of the otherness of others as it has come into practical contact with one or another sort of them. Africa, the Heart of Darkness: tom-toms, witchcraft, unspeakable rites. Asia, the Decaying Mansion: effete brahmins, corrupt mandarins, dissolute emirs. Aboriginal Australia, Oceania, and in part the Americas, Humanity degr& ze'ro: urkinship, ur-religion, ur-science, and the origins of incest. But Japan, about the last such elsewhere located, or anyway penetrated, has been for us more absolutely otherwise. It has been the Impossible Object. An enormous something, trim, intricate, and madly busy, that, like an Escher drawing, fails to compute. From Madama Butterfly and Kokoro to Pacific Overtures and L'Empire des signes, the country (the only real place, save of course for England, that appears as more than a reference point in Gulliver's Travels) has looked not just distant but off the map: "a funny place." "The Japanese," Benedict's book opens, "[are] the most alien enemy the United States [has] ever fought"—a challenge not just to our power, but to our powers of comprehension. "Conventions of war which Western nations had come to accept as a fact of human nature obviously did not exist for the Japanese. [This] made the war in the Pacific more than a series of landings on island beaches, more than an unsurpassed problem of logistics. It made it a major problem in the nature of the enemy. We had to understand their behavior in order to cope with it."

The great originality of Benedict's book (which had its genesis, of course, in her intelligence and propaganda work during the war) and the basis of its force, a force even its severest critics have felt, lies in the fact that she does not seek to unriddle Japan and the Japanese by moderating this sense of an oddly made world populated by oddly wired people, but by accentuating it. The habit of contrasting an "as-we-know" us with an "imagine-that" them is here carried to climax; as though American Indians and Melanesians had been but warm-ups for the really different. And what is more, the contrasting is now explicit and particular, not, as in Patterns of Culture, implied and general—specific this-es set against specific thats. I had thought to count the number of such "in America"/"in Japan" tropes in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, but soon gave it up as a tiresome task leading to an unscalable number. But the drumbeat of them resounds, instance upon instance, through the whole of the book.

On sleeping:

Sleeping is … one of the most accomplished arts of the Japanese. They sleep with complete relaxation … under circumstances we regard as sheer impossibilities. This has surprised many Western students of the Japanese. Americans make insomnia almost a synonym for psychic tenseness, and according to our standards there are high tensions in the Japanese character.… Americans are used to rating sleeping as something one does to keep up one's strength and the first thought of most of us when we wake up in the morning is to calculate how many hours we slept that night. The length of our slumbers tells us how much energy and efficiency we will have that day. The Japanese sleep for other reasons.

On eating:

According to Japanese ideas, involuntary deprivation of food is an especially good test of how 'hardened' one is.… [Being] without food is a chance to demonstrate that one can 'take it.' … [One's] strength is raised by one's victory of the spirit, not lowered by the lack of calories and vitamins. The Japanese do not recognize the one-to-one correspondence which Americans postulate between body nourishment and body strength.

On sex and marriage:

They fence off one province which belongs to the wife from another which belongs to erotic pleasure. Both provinces are equally open and above board. The two are not divided from each other as in American life by the fact that one is what a man admits to the public and the other is surreptitious … The Japanese set up no ideal, as we do in the United States, which pictures love and marriage as one and the same thing.

On masculinity:

[Homosexuality falls] among those 'human feelings' about which moralistic attitudes are inappropriate. It must be kept in its proper place and not interfere with carrying on the family. Therefore the danger of a man … 'becoming' a homosexual, as the Western phrase has it, is hardly conceived … The Japanese are especially shocked at adult passive homosexuals in the United States. Adult men in Japan would seek out boy partners, for adults consider the passive rôle to be beneath their dignity. The Japanese draw their own lines as to what a man can do and retain his self-respect, but they are not the ones we draw.

On drinking:

The Japanese consider our American total abstinence pledges as one of the strange vagaries of the Occident … Drinking sake is a pleasure no man in his right mind would deny himself. But alcohol belongs among the minor relaxations and no man in his right mind, either, would become obsessed by it. According to their way of thinking one does not fear to 'become' a drunkard any more than one fears to 'become' a homosexual, and it is true that the compulsive drunkard is not a social problem in Japan.

On Good and Evil:

To American ears such doctrines [that no evil is inherent in man's soul; that virtue does not consist in fighting evil] seem to lead to a philosophy of self-indulgence and licence. The Japanese, however … define the task of life as fulfilling one's obligations. They fully accept the fact that repaying [moral debts] means sacrificing one's personal desires and pleasures. The idea that the pursuit of happiness is a serious goal of life is to them an amazing and immoral doctrine.

And on happy endings:

[The] 'happy ending' is … rare in their novels and plays. American popular audiences crave solutions. They want to believe that people live happily ever after. They want to know that people are rewarded for their virtue.… Japanese popular audiences sit dissolved in tears watching the hero come to his tragic end and the lovely heroine slain because of a turn of the wheel of fortune. Such plots are the high points of an evening's entertainment. They are what people go to see.… Their modern war films are in the same tradition. Americans who see these movies often say that they are the best pacifist propaganda they ever saw. This is a characteristic American reaction because the movies are wholly concerned with the sacrifice and suffering of war.… Their curtain scenes are not victory or even banzai charges. They are overnight halts in some featureless Chinese town deep in the mud. Or they show maimed, halt and blind representatives of three generations of a Japanese family, survivors of three wars.… The stirring background of Anglo-American 'Cavalcade' movies is all absent … Not even the purposes for which the war was fought are mentioned. It is enough for the Japanese audience that all the people on the screen have repaid [their moral debt to the Emperor] with everything that was in them, and these movies therefore in Japan were propaganda of the militarists. Their sponsors knew that Japanese audiences were not stirred by them to pacifism.

The empirical validity of these various assertions, taken from a mere ten pages, not unrepresentative, in the middle of the book, aside (and some of them do sound more like reports from a society supposed than from one surveyed), the unrelenting piling up of them, the one hardly dispatched before the next appears, is what give Benedict's argument its extraordinary energy. She persuades, to the degree she does persuade—significantly so, in fact, even among the Japanese, who seem to find themselves as puzzling as does everyone else—by the sheer force of iteration. The Us/Not-us motif is pursued through an enormous range of wildly assorted materials derived from wildly assorted sources (legends, movies, interviews with Japanese expatriates and prisoners of war, scholarly works, newspaper accounts, radio broadcasts, "antiquarian papers," novels, speeches in the Diet, military intelligence reports) with the sort of single-mindedness that compels either general belief or an equally general skepticism. Prevented, and not only by the war, but by deafness and disinclination, from "being there" literally, Benedict rests her authority on being there imaginatively—moving locus to locus across the Impossible Object, and confronting on every page what she herself calls "the ever-present question: What is 'wrong with this picture?'"

But, as one can see even from this short sequence of quotations, moving from examples in which "they" sound the odd case to ones in which "we" do, a disconcerting twist appears in the course of this forced march through cultural difference; an unexpected swerve that sets the campaign a bit off course. It comes in the fact that, as she proceeds through everything from Japanese incredulity that an American admiral should be awarded a medal for rescuing crippled warships to American incredulity that the Japanese can see fulfillment in suicide, Japan comes to look, somehow, less and less erratic and arbitrary while the United States comes to look, somehow, more and more so. There is, in fact, nothing "wrong with the picture," just with those who look at it upside down; and the enemy who at the beginning of the book is the most alien we have ever fought is, by the end of it, the most reasonable we have ever conquered. Japanese newspapers pronounce defeat as "all to the good for the ultimate salvation of Japan." Japanese politicians happily govern the country under MacArthur's umbrella-parasol. And the Emperor, urged by the General's advisors to disavow divinity, complains he is not really regarded as a god but does so anyway because foreigners seem to think that he is and it should be good for the country's image.

This peculiar passage from perversity to pragmatism on the Asian hand and from levelheadedness to provinciality on the American, rigidity and flexibility passing one another somewhere in mid-Pacific, is the real story The Chrysnthemum and the Sword has to tell, though again it tells it more in the form of an examples-and-morals homily than in that of a directionally plotted tale. What started out as a familiar sort of attempt to unriddle oriental mysteries ends up, only too successfully, as a deconstruction, avant la lettre, of occidental clarities. At the close, it is, as it was in Patterns of Culture, us that we wonder about. On what, pray tell, do our certainties rest? Not much, apparently, save that they're ours.

So, again, and here more powerfully because more confidently (if, in Patterns of Culture she writes like a lawyer pleading a case, in Tbe Chrystbemum and the Sword she writes like a judge deciding one), Benedict dismantles American exceptionalism by confronting it with that—even more exceptional—of a spectacularized other. But again, too, the fact that that is what she in fact is doing, intends to be doing, and in the event gets pretty well done, is somewhat obscured, to the point that it is frequently not seen at all. And it is the same interpretive misstep, similarly encouraged by Benedict herself, her own best misreader, that causes all the trouble: the misassimilation of her work to the intellectual environment immediately surrounding it.

Benedict's courage, extraordinary when you think about it, in writing about the Japanese as she did, a few years after Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, Guadalcanal, and a thousand Hollywood movies populated with myopic sadists lisping hatred, has been at least occasionally remarked; but the subversive effect of her doing so on her American readers' received views about which way is forward and which direction is up (something even riskier) has not. Although undergraduates, not yet appropriately instructed as to what one is not allowed to look for in an anthropological monograph, sometimes sense the book's satirical edge, and are disturbed by it, the common conception of the work has been that it amounts to a psycho-political how-to-handle-the-Japanese training manual, conceptually a bit flighty, empirically a bit weak, morally a bit dubious. What is surely one of the most acid ethnographies ever written—"[The Japanese] play up suicide as the Americans play up crime, and they have the same vicarious enjoyment of it"—and the most bleakly mocking—"[A Japanese's moral debts] are [his] constant shadow, like a New York farmer's worry about his mortgage or a Wall Street financier's as he watches the market climb when he has sold short"—is seen as a brief for a science and sensibility, can-do optimism.

That was certainly the context, intellectual and political (or, as this was wartime and just after, intellectualpolitical), within which the book was written. Now it was not the natural laboratory, 'formes élémentaires, "beholdthe-beetle image of what anthropology had "to contribute" that Benedict felt was necessary in order to raise her work above the level of mere belles lettres into something more scientifically respectable. Rather, now it was "national character," "policy science," and "culture at a distance." And the people around her now were not just the inevitable Margaret Mead, herself turned toward larger canvases and more strategic goals, but a whole phalanx of psychological warriors, propaganda analysts, intelligence experts, and program planners. Scholars in uniform.

The story of this particular phase in American social science (and it was a phase; by the late 1950's it was over, anyway in anthropology, killed by too much promising of elephants and bringing forth of mice) has yet to be written in a detached and analytical way. There are only anecdotes, puffs, and war-horse reminiscences. But the fact that Benedict was not altogether at home with its style, its purposes, and its cast of mind, what she herself might have called its temper, is clear. Here, too, what she says when she is talking about her subject and what she says when she is talking about why she is talking about her subject don't quite comport.

Because The Chrysantbemum and the Sword, like Patterns of Culture, only really gets started about fifty pages in and is essentially over about fifty from its close (Benedict's works, like most Moralities, seem naturally to climax at their center) this two-mindedness appears most obviously again in the opening and closing sections of the book. The first chapter, "Assignment: Japan," a drum roll, and the last, "The Japanese Since VJ-Day," a briefing paper, place the work with the appropriate breathlessness in the Science-in-the-Nation's-Service frame that the times seemed to call for: "Whether the issue [facing the U.S. Government] was military or diplomatic, … every insight was important." But it is in the penultimate chapter, "The Child Learns," that the intellectual style of the Foreign Morale Analysis Division of the Office of War Information and its Navy-sponsored civilian successor, Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures, most fatally invades Benedict's crisscross world. The apostrophes to the anthropology of leaflets and high policy have faded with the excitements that gave rise to them; but, like the pages on relativism in Patterns of Culture, those on shame, guilt, swaddling, and teasing in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword have had only too much staying power.

Whatever the reasons this shy, courtly, rather depressive, rather disdainful, and anything but right-minded woman may have had for wanting to surround an aesthetic view of human behavior with the trappings of an activist social science (a sense of being out of step, a desire to connect, a will to believe, a Christian idealism even anthropology couldn't cure), they are lost in the mists of her personal life. That she was not altogether comfortable in doing so can be seen, however, in the sudden shift in the childraising chapter from a confident descriptive idiom to a much less confident causal one. In the compact, closefocus middle chapters on Japanese conceptions of hierarchy, moral indebtedness, "the circle of feelings," and selfdiscipline, everything is a matter of a point in a pattern, the placing of some practice or perception or belief or value in a context such that it makes sense; or anyway, Japanese sense. In "The Child Learns," the longest and most rambling chapter in the book, the project turns to a search for mechanisms, for specific socialization practices that will induce, as heat induces boiling or infection scarring, psychological dispositions that can account for why it is that the Japanese "cannot stand ridicule," dislike unpruned gardens, put mirrors in their shrines, and regard their gods as benevolent. A discourse on forms becomes, confusedly, one on levers.

The levers involved are, of course, familiar, not to say notorious—heavy diapers, taunting mothers, peer group tyranny. But what is interesting is that they are, in a book otherwise so intellectually self-reliant as to seem hermetic, for the most part not hers. The swaddling business, which is passed over rather hurriedly as a matter of fact, comes of course from Geoffrey Gorer, the English enthusiast Mead brought into the Columbia and Washington circle after Bateson's withdrawal from it, and whom Benedict almost eloquently omits from her generous "Acknowledgements," though she does, rather coolly, cite him as having "also emphasized the role of Japanese toilet training." The teasing business (the child alternately abandoned and embraced), of which much more is made, comes from Bateson and Mead's 1942 monograph on Bali, where it is the pervading theme.

And the peer group business comes again from a wartime report of Gorer's, this time at least briefly quoted.

The externality to Benedict's book of these borrowed devices, awkwardly introduced and clumsily applied, can be seen in the progression of the chapter itself, as it moves uneasily past them to return, almost with a sigh of relief, to portraiture—cherry blossoms, tea ceremonies, the lacquered lives of Japanese men—toward its conclusion. But perhaps the most telling picture of the tension comes again from Margaret Mead. In her book on Benedict and her writings, which is mainly an attempt, a decade after Benedict's death, to incorporate the older woman's persona into her own—making a predecessor look like a successor with a vengeance—Mead describes, in an exasperated and even resentful tone, unique in a book otherwise hagiographic, why it was The Chrysanthemum and the Sword achieved the acceptance it did:

Ruth Benedict herself was completely converted to the usefulness for the safety of the world, of the methods she had used. Certain other expositions of these same methods had antagonized readers because they had so bared their methods of deriving the insights that they reverberated uncomfortably in the minds of the readers. Her own lack of dependence upon psychoanalytic methods—which, in this case, meant a lack of dependence upon the zones of the body, which never made any sense to her—made the book palatable to readers who had resisted, as they now praised, the insights about the Japanese emperor originally developed by Geoffrey Gorer in 1942. Furthermore, her basic skepticism about American culture, which she shared with most liberals of her generation, made it possible for liberals to accept her sympathetic understanding of the virtues of Japanese culture without feeling forced to take a similarly sympathetic attitude toward their own culture, and this removed a stumbling block which stood in the way of anthropologists who did not feel this skepticism so strongly. It was the kind of book that colonels could mention to generals and captains to admirals without fear of producing an explosion against "jargon," the kind of book it would be safe to put in the hands of congressmen alert to resist the "schemes of long-haired intellectuals." The points were made so gracefully, so cogently, that the book disarmed almost all possible enemies except for those who leaned heavily to the Left and those who, through many years, had formed very clear and usually imperfect notions of their own Japanese experiences—the sort of people we used, in another context, to call "old China hands."

With anthropological authoring, as with other things, then, it all depends on the company you keep. Having decided what sort of discourse community she and thus Benedict, her John-the-Baptist, should belong to, Mead labors so desperately to keep her from escaping it because she seems to sense, and to sense that others sense, how insecurely Benedict rests there, how very less than complete that "conversion" to save-the-world anthropology in fact was, and how easily the image of ethnography for admirals slips away when one looks at what is there upon the page. Taking Benedict out of that community is, like putting her in, thus an interpretive act, and, if I may say so before someone else does, a contentious one with ambitions of its own.

To say one should read Benedict not with the likes of Gorer, Mead, Alexander Leighton, or Lawrence Frank at the back of one's mind, but with Swift, Montesquieu, Veblen, and W.S. Gilbert, is to urge a particular understanding of what it is she is saying. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is no more a prettied up science-without-tears policy tract than Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, In Four Parts, By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon and Then a Captain of Several Ships is a children's book. Benedict, who actually hardly went anywhere either, also wrote, as Swift said that he did, "to vex the world rather than divert it." It would be rather a pity were the world not to notice it.