SOURCE: "From Irrationality to Utility in Cultural Integration: Ruth Benedict," in Theories of Man and Culture, Columbia University Press, 1973, pp. 75-91.

[Hatch is an American anthropologist. In the following essay, he analyzes Benedict's view of the relationship between individuals and their culture.]

Victor Barnouw, one of Benedict's graduate students at Columbia, describes the impression she made on him then. "Like most of Ruth Benedict's students, I looked up to her with a mixture of veneration and bewilderment." He speaks of her "silvery aura of prestige, dignity, and charm." This aura was partially due to her remoteness. She was hard of hearing, shy, and frequently melancholy, and consequently she tended to remain aloof from people. But she was also a remarkably generous person, for she gave freely of both her time and money to friends and students who were in need.

Benedict was born in New York City in 1887. Her father, a surgeon, died when she was two years old, leaving her mother to support the family as a teacher and librarian. Because of a scholarship, however, Ruth and her sister were able to attend Vassar, and they graduated together in 1909.

Ruth taught school for two years after graduation, and in 1914 married a biochemist at the Cornell Medical College.

Benedict was restless before her marriage, and she apparently hoped that her husband and new home would bring an end to her discontentment. But the life of a housewife turned out to be quite unsuitable for her. She engaged in a variety of diversionary activities, including rhythmic dancing and social work. She even tried writing, especially poetry, an interest which she retained throughout her life. In 1919—still searching for a meaningful preoccupation—she began attending lectures in anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Anthropology met a response in her, and in 1921 she went to Columbia University to study under Franz Boas. She earned her Ph.D. the following year.

Benedict began teaching at Columbia after receiving her Ph.D., and she was untiring in the assistance she gave Boas in running the department. She continued in this role until Boas' retirement in 1937. During the war she went to Washington to work in the Office of War Information, conducting research on such strategically important peoples as the Japanese and Thai. After the war she returned to Columbia where she continued her research on large, complex societies. She died in 1948, after an eventful summer of traveling and teaching in Europe.

Benedict's culture concept may be summarized under two main headings: her ideas about integration, and about the sui generis nature of culture.

CULTURAL INTEGRATION.

Not only are Benedict's views about integration the best-known features of her thought, they are also the most important elements of her theory, since, to her, cultural integration is the master concept for the analysis of cultural phenomena. In Benedict's mind just as in Boas', integration is the principal "creative force" behind culture; although a culture is the chance accumulation of so many "disparate elements fortuitously assembled from all directions by diffusion," the constituent elements are modified to form "a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action." Her emphasis is on the term consistent. She cites the example of Gothic architecture, which began as "hardly more than a preference for altitude and light," but which "by the operation of some canon of taste" developed into "the unique and homogeneous art of the thirteenth century."

What was at first no more than a slight bias in local forms and techniques expressed itself more and more forcibly, integrated itself in more and more definite standards, and eventuated in Gothic art.

Like Boas, Benedict thought that the creative force of integration is located in the individual mind, and that it consists in the selection, rejection, and modification of culture traits by individuals according to the subjective standards of their culture. She never went into detail about the way in which integration takes place, but she did mention two mechanisms. First, each culture has its "favorite" or "most cherished" customs, such as the potlatch of the Northwest Coast Indians or the religious ceremonies of the Zuni. The individual tends to focus his attention on these customs and to elaborate them, and consequently they become the dominant features of the culture. Second, she held that some people by temperament find their culture more congenial than others. Those who fit their culture best are the most successful and tend to become influential. As a result, they leave a stronger impression on their culture than other people, and they tend to incline it even farther in the direction in which it is moving.

Implicit in her discussion is a distinction between two levels at which the process of integration operates: the level of culture traits on one hand, and the level of emotional patterning on the other.

Considering first the level of traits, Benedict emphasized again and again that culture elements occur in limitless combinations. In one society a particular culture element, such as an art form, may be incorporated into the religious system, whereas in another society the same trait may be redefined as a valuable commodity and become part of the system of economic exchange. "The possibilities are endless and the adjustments are often bizarre."

In addition, there is an infinite number of possible emphases in a culture, since any trait or complex of traits can become a focal point and then be "elaborated past belief." For example, the Todas of India have singled out their buffalo herds and have made them the focus of their lives. Their religious ritual is essentially a dairy ritual, the dairymen are priests, and the sacred cowbell is the holy of holies. The Australian aborigines have elaborated the restrictions of exogamy in unparalleled fashion. The Kurnai of Australia have such rigid marriage rules that it is typically impossible for a young man to find an acceptable bride, and as a result he has to elope, risking death at the hands of the pursuing villagers. The Kurnai, according to Benedict, "have extended and complicated a particular aspect of behavior until it is a social liability."

An important feature of Benedict's views about integration is that no two cultures are ever alike. The mode of integration of a culture is fortuitous, the product of the almost arbitrary and limitless recombination, reinterpretation, and elaboration of traits.

The view that cultural integration is fortuitous was the direct outgrowth of diffusion studies. When a trait is followed from one society to another it is patently evident that the trait does enter into different combinations, assume different forms, and receive different emphases; and these changes seem to follow no pattern. Benedict's Ph.D. thesis, published in 1923, is exemplary. She set out to test various theories about the origin of religion, hoping to determine if there were "some fixed causality which is at work" behind religious beliefs. She focused on a trait which was found almost universally among North American Indians, the concept of the guardian spirit. Her problem was to determine which of its features were stable, and therefore necessary or causal. She concluded that nothing was stable in this complex; there was "no coalescence" or combination of traits "which we may regard as being other than fortuitous." Rather, she found a "fluid recombination" or "desultory association" of culture traits. Among the Thompson River Indians the guardian spirit complex was intimately associated with male puberty rites, whereas among the Kwakiutl the guardian spirit was a hereditary caste mark which was highly valued as a private possession. On the Great Plains the guardian spirit concept "developed along still different lines," for the Plains Indians imposed no limitation on the sex or age of the recipient of a guardian spirit, and the vision was obtained through isolation, fasting, and self-torture.

The diffusionist perspective which Benedict employed in this study was the immediate result of her training under Boas. Mead notes that Benedict began her graduate work at Columbia at a time when Boas was still having his students trace the diffusion of traits from culture to culture, "showing the changes which the trait or the complex of traits underwent."

The second level at which Benedict viewed cultural integration was that of emotion. The search for cross-cultural uniformities seemed fruitless to her, because in her view the conclusions of these studies would all be negative. Consequently, after completing her Ph.D. thesis she turned away from comparative studies and toward the problem of integration. She began to seek an abstract framework that would make sense of the general patterns which seemed to pervade each culture; she sought "some integrating principle" by which to explain the unity of culture which "she felt was there (Mead)." In the summer of 1927 the idea which she sought finally came to her, and she set forth her theory during the late twenties and early thirties. Consistent with her Boasian background, she did not locate the organizing principle behind culture in the phenomenal world of environmental, economic, or social structural factors, but at the level of subjective thought. She hit upon the idea that the differences between cultures can be explained like the differences between people: like an individual, each culture tends to have a distinct temperament. "Cultures from this point of view are individual psychology thrown large upon the screen, given gigantic proportions and a long time span." Benedict called this integrating principle the cultural ethos or configuration.

Perhaps the best examples of Benedict's configurationalism are her analyses of the Pueblo and Plains Indians. Benedict characterized the Pueblo configuration as Apollonian; it stressed moderation and cooperation, and gave little or no place to excess, frenzy, and individualism. For example, the religious rituals of the Pueblos were meticulously regulated and organized and allowed little expression of emotion. The leader in Pueblo society almost had to be coerced into serving, because he was reluctant to set himself above and apart from his fellow community members. Benedict characterized the ethos of the Plains Indians as Dionysian. The individualism and emotional frenzy which the Pueblos virtually eliminated were capitalized upon by the Plains cultures. For example, a dominant feature of Plains Indian religion was the vision quest, which entailed self-torture, fasting, and emotional frenzy. Warfare was highly developed on the Plains; it was pursued aggressively and violently, and exploits in war were a means of attaining personal glory.

The integrating principle which Benedict hit upon—the cultural configuration—is essentially an emotional pattern: it consists of an emotional bent or attitude which in time tends to pervade a culture. The distinctive feature of the Dionysian ethos of the Plains was not simply a unique organization of traits, or the dominance of certain culture elements or activities. It was an emotional tone: intemperate, excessive individualism. Similarly, the Apollonian ethos of the Pueblos was the attitude of moderation, nondemonstrativeness, and group-orientation. It might be said that in searching for an integrating principle below the level of culture traits, Benedict simply pulled together two threads of Boas' thought: first, his view that one of the primary creative forces of culture is the tendency toward consistency within the subjective sphere, and second, his view that custom is at bottom emotional. Benedict's configuration is an emotional consistency in culture.

Although Boas and others recognized the role of emotion in human behavior long before Benedict began working in anthropology, she is to be credited with carrying this insight a step farther by emphasizing the need for a systematic and thorough understanding of the emotional level of cultural life. She noted that Americans are likely to misunderstand the Pueblo snake dance if they fail to grasp the "emotional background" of the performance. To the American, the snake dance elicits a feeling of repulsion and horror, but for the Pueblo Indian "the whole procedure is upon the level of a dance with eagles or with kittens." Benedict argued that in the usual ethnographic monograph the "emotional background" of custom is not provided. She stated that ethnographic descriptions "must include much that older fieldwork ignored, and without the relevant fieldwork all our propositions are pure romancing."

A distinguishing feature of Benedict's view of cultural integration at the level of traits is that each culture has a different pattern of organization. The same is true at the level of emotion, for she held that each configuration is unique. It follows that anthropology cannot be a comparative science and that there is little possibility of developing a general body of theory that will apply to all peoples. For example, a political theory that would be applicable to the temperate and cooperative Pueblos would hardly apply to the excessively individualistic Plains Indians.

Some hold that Benedict's views about the incommensurability of cultures represent a dead-end in anthropology:

The difficulty with the assumption of "incommensurability" is that, if it is taken literally, scientific work becomes impossible. If two objects or events are truly incommensurable, then no further statements can be made about them in the same universe of discourse (Aberle).

However, it would be a mistake to think that Benedict's scheme lacks explanatory power. The key to both anthropological explanation and the meaning of human affairs, in her view, is the concept of integration:

for there is no axiom of cultural study which is more clearly established than the fact that a whole array of familial, political, economic and religious institutions mutually condition one another and conversely are unintelligible when considered in isolation.

In Benedict's view, explanation amounts to showing the context of each trait, or how it fits within the total integrational pattern.

Benedict implicitly distinguished between two levels of integration, and accordingly there are two different contexts within which a cultural item can be viewed. First is the level of traits. The ceremonial system of the Toda is intelligible by reference to the cultural focus on buffalo herds; outside that context such features as the holy cowbell and the dairymen's role as priests are without meaning. Similarly, the practice of elopement among the Kurnai makes sense only when viewed in relation to the cultural focus on marriage regulations.

An even more important context to Benedict was that of the cultural configuration, since, to her, integration at the level of traits is governed largely by the principles contained at the level of emotion: for example, because of the cultural ethos of the Pueblo Indians, it would have been virtually inconceivable for them to have elaborated the warfare complex the way the Plains Indians did; and the emphasis placed on warfare by the Plains cultures was quite consistent with their emotional theme.

The explanatory potential of Benedict's configuration concept is particularly evident when applied to problems of culture history. Living near the Pueblo Indians were a number of Dionysian peoples who employed alcohol and drugs extensively in their religious ritual. The intoxicants and drugs were used to achieve a religious experience or vision. However, "none of these alcohol and drug-induced excitations have gained currency among the Pueblos," because hallucinatory religious experiences were uncongenial to the Pueblo configuration. Moreover, the Pueblo religious functionaries practiced fasting in connection with their ritual performances. The fast was not used to induce visions as it was on the Plains and elsewhere, however, but was simply "a requirement for ceremonial cleanness." This culture trait—fasting—had been modified and brought into conformity with the ethos of Pueblo society.

Benedict's configuration concept is an explanatory device in a nonhistorical sense as well, for it supplies the meaning of human affairs. To view a trait within its configurational context is to see it in terms of its emotional and attitudinal matrix, and integrational analysis therefore amounts to a form of subjective understanding. Customs and behavior which seem absurd from the outside become quite reasonable once the emotional pattern behind them is grasped. As ridiculous and inhumane as Plains warfare and selftorture seems to a Western European, these institutions make sense from the perspective of the emotional theme of Plains culture.

The singularity of this configurational form of subjective understanding is thrown into relief when contrasted with [E. B.] Tylor's mode of analysis. To Tylor, societies at different levels of evolution exhibit different degrees of reason, but the same standard of rationality is applicable to the institutions of all peoples. Like Boas, Benedict was tacitly proposing that reason is subordinate and in a sense epiphenomenal to emotion, for reason is thoroughly distorted by emotional bias. What appears to an American as an irrational, paranoid approach to life is perfectly reasonable given the emotional slant of Dobuan culture. The same standard of rationality does not apply to all peoples, and in order to grasp the reasoning behind foreign institutions the emotional context must first be understood.

An important implication of Benedict's integrational approach is that it precludes the study of cultural institutions outside their larger context. In considering this issue it is again useful to distinguish between the two levels of integration implicit in her work, and to consider the level of traits first.

One of the primary assumptions of [A. R.] RadcliffeBrown's approach is that social structure constitutes a system which can be studied and understood in terms of its internal principles. For example, he analyzed the structure of lineage systems by reference to such principles as unilineal descent and the equivalence of siblings. He also assumed that a cultural emphasis or de-emphasis on such features as art, puberty rites, and even economic activities is not important for his analysis, and if he brought the issue of cultural foci into his account he did so in order to explain them in terms of the social structure and not vice versa. To Radcliffe-Brown, understanding is achieved largely by reference to the principles of social structure.

Benedict's position was that each sector of culture has to be viewed in the context of the whole, for each is part of the larger system of integration and is subject to the principles which govern the whole. The Toda emphasized and elaborated a particular feature of their economic life, and the social structure had to be viewed in that context. Benedict would say that it was the focus on buffalo herds rather than the principles of social structure which explained the organization of Toda society.

To Benedict, integration at the level of emotion is even more basic than that at the level of traits, and she believed that the configurational context is essential for anthropological analysis:

The significant sociological unit… is not the institution but the cultural configuration. The studies of the family, of primitive economics, or of moral ideas need to be broken up into studies that emphasize the different configurations that in instance after instance have dominated these traits.

The implications of this point of view for anthropological studies can be illustrated again by reference to RadcliffeBrown's social structural framework. A number of anthropologists have attempted to show that the ease and frequency of divorce in society is a function of structural arrangements—in other words, that the principles of social structure explain differences in divorce patterns. In a society with strongly matrilineal lineages the jural rights in a woman are divided between the woman's matrilineal kin and her husband; consequently, the marital relationship is relatively unstable and divorce is comparatively easy and frequent. In strongly patrilineal societies the jural rights in a married woman are vested primarily in her affinal kin, particularly her husband, and as a result divorce tends to be infrequent and difficult. To Benedict, it is not the social structure which explains divorce patterns, but the cultural configuration. Divorce was frequent and easy in Pueblo society, but not primarily because the villages were organized on the basis of strongly matrilineal kin groups. Rather, the Pueblo configuration stressed nondemonstrativeness and village-wide cooperation. There was little emphasis on institutions such as marriage and divorce which were "matters for the individual to attend to." Nor was there much room in Pueblo culture for jealousy, or for an emotional attachment between husband and wife "that refuses to accept dismissal": this was a culture in which institutions "effectively minimize the appearance of a violent emotion like jealousy." In short, marriage was easily dissolved because of the Apollonian ethos.

Benedict's rejection of the possibility that institutions can be understood outside their integrational contexts recalls a point made earlier, that Benedict's approach denies the feasibility of comparative studies. To her, the pattern of integration of each culture is incommensurate. Anthropology can attempt to understand the features of specific cultures, but each cultural system has to be accounted for by a separate body of theory.

THE SUI GENERIS NATURE OF CULTURE.

To Benedict, culture is to be understood in terms of its internal principles, and these are relatively autonomous from outside influences. The autonomy of culture emerges as an issue in her work in two separate contexts: in her views about the relationship between culture and the environment on one hand, and between culture and personality on the other.

Some anthropologists view culture in terms of its utilitarian functions, emphasizing its role in accommodating man to his natural habitat. According to this perspective the most important cultural processes are those involved in the relationship between culture and the environment. For example, culture change is seen largely as a result of the progressive adaptation of the total system to local circumstances. To Benedict, however, it is the sui generis principles of cultural integration which hold the key to cultural dynamics, and culture change is essentially the progressive unfolding and application of these principles. Technology and cultural adaptation are like puberty rites, warfare, or social structure: they are features which can be emphasized and elaborated in one culture but virtually ignored in the next:

In one society technology is unbelievably slighted even in those aspects of life which seem necessary to insure survival; in another, equally simple, technological achievements are complex and fitted with admirable nicety to the situation.

If the relationship between culture and environment is important in a particular society, it is so essentially by chance.

Benedict went yet farther, for she implied that the relationship between culture and habitat is frequently whimsical or even fantastic. She stated that, in elaborating the features of his culture, man "has a passion for extremes." Economic pursuits need not be directed toward providing the necessities of life at all, but "toward piling up in lavish display many times the necessary food supply of the people and allowing it to rot ostentatiously for pride's sake." The first menstruation of a young girl may involve "the redistribution of practically all the property of a tribe." The Plains Indians who received supernatural power through visions believed they were bullet-proof, and they went into battle convinced of their invulnerability. Benedict writes that in his social institutions

Man can get by with a mammoth load of useless lumber.… After all, man has a fairly wide margin of safety, and he will not be forced to the wall even with a pitiful handicap.

To Benedict, culture is hardly utilitarian in nature, designed for man's benefit. One of the things that anthropologists have made up their minds about, she wrote, is that "it is usually beside the point to argue the social usefulness of a custom." Indeed, in Benedict's view custom is frequently disadvantageous or impractical; in this sense it is irrational. Benedict's thought was very much like Boas' on this issue.

Benedict's view of the impracticality of custom is illustrated by her analysis of the potlatch of the Kwakiutl Indians. She interpreted the potlatch by reference to the cultural configuration of the Northwest Coast, which she characterized as megalomaniacal because of its emphasis on selfglorification and on the bettering and shaming of rivals. The chief who gave the potlatch strove both to demonstrate his superiority by distributing or destroying as much property as possible, and to shame those he had invited by the generosity of his gifts. Although the institution was understandable from the perspective of the cultural configuration, it was wasteful and costly from the practical point of view.

The distinctiveness of Benedict's interpretation of the potlatch is highlighted when it is compared with some of the later studies. One of these suggests that the institution should be understood as an adaptive mechanism, a response to variations and fluctuations in food supply. According to this analysis, not only were there differences in food productivity between localities, but in addition all localities suffered periods of relative scarcity. The potlatch functioned to redistribute food and thereby to equalize its availability. The Kwakiutl drive to achieve prestige was necessary to keep the system operating, for it provided the motivation to ensure that the people participated; but it was not the reason for the existence of the potlatch.

The second context in which the sui generis nature of culture emerged as an issue in Benedict's thought was in her conception of the relationship between culture and personality. She held that culture is virtually autonomous from natural processes of thought, because the latter are highly circumscribed, almost obliterated, by culture. Benedict noted that as detailed descriptions of different peoples accumulated, anthropologists began to question the earlier ideas about "human nature"; what had been thought of as natural inclinations or reactions came to be interpreted as culturally determined responses:

In some societies adolescence was a period of rebellion, of stress and strain; in some societies it was a period of calm, a time when one especially enjoyed oneself. In some societies men were violent and quarrelsome; in some, no voice was raised above its wonted key and no man was known in all their memory to have struck another. The list of contrasts was endless, and the conclusion could not be avoided: a great deal of what had ordinarily been regarded as due to "human nature" was, instead, culturally determined.

Thought is so thoroughly determined that the individual willingly follows the dictates of custom even when they go directly against reason or his own practical interests. Culture can make the Kwakiutl chief ambitious enough to waste his energy, time, and wealth on the potlatch, and it can make the Plains Indian truly believe that a hallucination makes him invulnerable to bullets.

The reason culture has such a powerful hold on man is because of its emotional foundations. The individual acquires such a strong emotional commitment to his customs and beliefs that it is virtually impossible for him to question them, let alone reject them:

Even given the freest scope by their institutions, men are never inventive enough to make more than minute changes. From the point of view of an outsider the most radical innovations in any culture amount to no more than a minor revision, and it is commonplace that prophets have been put to death for the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

If the emotional features of the mind are so thoroughly affected by culture, then it follows that different cultures produce fundamentally different types of personality. Not only did the Plains Indians and Pueblos differ in their customs, but the people themselves were different. The Plains warrior or vision seeker was not merely playing a Dionysian role: he was Dionysian, and his customs fit him like a glove. His personality had been so thoroughly molded and reworked by his culture that it could almost be said that he was a different species of animal from the gentle and unassuming Pueblo villager.

A corollary of Benedict's emphasis on culture as a determinant of the personality is her view that the mind is a tabula rasa at birth. Either the natural, pre-cultural features of the personality are all but nonexistent, or they are so malleable that they are obliterated once the process of socialization is complete. Mead states that the tabula rasa assumption was only a working hypothesis for field research, and that if there are intrinsic principles or features of the mind which are not culturally determined, they should be discovered by comparative research. I think Benedict would have agreed. In fact, however, the tabula rasa assumption was more than a working hypothesis in Benedict's work, for it had a major effect on her interpretation of data. Her analysis of the Pueblo Indians is illustrative.

Studies of Pueblo culture are numerous, and they have been classified by Bennett into two broad categories. The first he calls the organic theories, for they emphasize "the organic wholeness" of Pueblo life. This interpretation regards Pueblo culture as a highly integrated system, exhibiting a set of harmonious and consistent values which pervade nearly all aspects of life. The organic theory holds that the Pueblo personality is one "which features the virtues of gentleness, non-aggression, cooperation, modesty, tranquillity, and so on." Benedict's analysis is organic in this sense. The other interpretation Benedict calls the repression theory, according to which Pueblo society is "marked by considerable covert tension, suspicion, anxiety, hostility, fear, and ambition." The culture is repressive and coercive, and the individual reacts to it with suppressed hostility.

Benedict relates this difference in interpretation to differences in value orientations held by the investigators. Those who adhere to the organic theory, she feels, "show a preference for homogeneous preliterate culture," whereas those who hold the repression view have "a fairly clear bias in the direction of equalitarian democracy and nonneurotic, 'free' behavior." This controversy may be seen from another perspective as well. Benedict's organic interpretation assumes that the personality more or less passively accepts the shape that is given it by culture. It assumes that since Pueblo culture is Apollonian, the individual is as well. In brief, it assumes that culture is the primary determinant of the personality. On the other hand, the repression theory does not regard the personality as so completely determined or transformed by culture as Benedict believed; the individual, caught in a stifling and repressive milieu, reacts or fights back.