SOURCE: "Patterns of Culture," in Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, pp. 184-215.

[Modell is an American anthropologist. In the following excerpt from her biography of Benedict she discusses the themes in Patterns of Culture in relation to Benedict's life and times.]

In Patterns of Culture Ruth Benedict focused on a topic with personal ramifications and a professional legitimacy; self and society was not a new topic for her or her discipline. She went beyond the self-is-nothing-without-society theorem and, though readers did not always notice, beyond a mere equivalence of personality and culture. Ruth claimed that individuals needed society for their very individuality and that societies needed individualities in order to survive, adjust to crisis, and change.

Ruth also had a particular idea about how to present these points. In proper anthropological fashion, her fieldwork experiences gave her a clue. She applied a Zufii concept of "the ideal man" to her discussion of self and society and in the process substantiated her notion of "pattern."

Through their "ideal," Zufii Indians perpetuated a standard of individual behavior. The standard reflected cultural values and became a vehicle for transmitting pattern from society to individuals. Ruth Benedict borrowed the idea to express connections between individual and culture without attributing cause or direction. She avoided Reo Fortune's occasional emphasis on institutional causes (overall, the two anthropologists agreed remarkably, perhaps with Margaret Mead's help). She also avoided an implication that individual (or personality) simply reflected culture, the person being only a blotter for cultural expectations.

"The ideal man in Zufli is a person of dignity and affability who has never tried to lead, and who has never called forth comment from his neighbours." The Zuili ideal man reiterated the culture pattern. The Dobuans, too, told of their ideal man, and Fortune wrote: "In other words the desirable man is he who has sought and gained the dangerous values unhurt by the black art of his rivals." And the Kwakiutl, never to be outdone, recreated an ideal man for future ethnographers: "You knew my father, and you know what he did with his property. He was reckless and did not care what he did.… He was a true chief among the Koskimo."

These are the protagonists of Patterns of Culture. The three figures are not biographical subjects; rather, they represent personality types, embodying the "type" of the culture. Much as she relished her "heroes," Ruth in fact kept biography out of ethnography, in regard to persons if not to approach. She was not interested in particular personalities when she drafted Patterns of Culture and, with notable restraint, did not describe any of the people she met in the Pueblos. She wrote about the ideal person Nick and Flora recognized and, presumably, valued. Or maybe not Nick. According to Elsie Clews Parsons and other Southwest ethnographers, Nick embodied antithetical traits and was by no means the typical mild and unambitious Zufii. Nick succeeded, thanks to visiting anthropologists and a last-minute rescue from the punishment due a witch, anyone who, like him, contradicted Zuffi prized virtues. Nick was exceptional. According to Ruth Benedict, usually the individual who most closely approximated the "ideal" succeeded in his or her setting. This congenial individual expressed in behavior and beliefs the dominant values of his culture. The congenial individual also won prestige and material rewards. Ruth added an important point: the accommodating and successful individual could effectively modify existing patterns. Here, however, she raised a problem and postponed discussion until her last two, nonethnographic chapters.

For Ruth Benedict individuality was a matter of expression, and the "ideal man" set boundaries for the expression of self in a society. Every culture provided channels for expression, in action and in gesture, channels that were both limiting and releasing. Ruth also included in her account the possibility of individuals for whom provided channels were not adequate or satisfactory or possible at all. The conventional forms of expression had to allow for the emotional as well as the intellectual impulses of human beings. Thus, Ruth returned to an old preoccupation, a fascination with the forces of irrationality in every society. That was her theme in "Animism" and in coincidental reviews of Levy-Bruhl.

"The death of a near relative is the closest thrust that existence deals." Death tests the ability of a culture to handle profound individual emotions and to restore to a group its order. Ruth Benedict had picked a subject whose resonance to her life would not be noticed under the traditional attention given death customs in anthropology.

Death and mourning rituals dramatized the emotional content of an individual-culture link. Rituals, especially, highlighted the significance of conventionalized, formulaic expressions for individual grief. "Prayer in Zufii is never an outpouring of the human heart.… And the prayers are never remarkable for their intensity. They are always mild and ceremonious in form." Ruth knew the value of structured expression for relieving agony; she also knew that individuals might be variously attuned to conventional patterns. Death, the supreme crisis for individual and society, was faced and handled uniquely by every person and every culture.

The Dobuan reacted to death with malice and vengeance. "Dobu in Dr. Fortune's words, 'cower under a death as under a whipping,' and look about immediately for a victim … the person to charge with one's fatal illness. On the Northwest Coast the Kwakiutl pitches his will against death: "Death was the paramount affront they recognized." The Zuili individual hardly mourned and minimally acknowledged grief. The typical Zufii accepted death calmly, expressed sadness only with others, resigned to that as to everything in life.

Ruth's conviction that individual "terrors" can be brought to bay within formal conventions and available traditions colored her middle three chapters. A reader remembers the Zuiii rhythmically scattering black cornmeal, the Dobuan locating and punishing the inevitable killer, and the Kwakiutl burning his house in arrogant protest against death. Through such vignettes the anthropologist reiterated but did not dissect the links between an individual and his culture. The artist in Patterns of Culture exploited the stylistic potential: Death comes near the end of each chapter.

Death provided a further lesson in the book. During her fieldwork Ruth Benedict asked the Zuili about suicide and to her amazement found that no one recognized the idea. Even more startling, the Zuiii did not seem to require an idea of self-destruction: "They have no idea what it could be." (This point, among others, elicited severe criticism; anthropologists who objected to Ruth's approach stressed the violence in Zufli life, toward oneself and others.) The Dobuan killed himself and the Kwakiutl did, each in characteristic fashion. In suicide, each carried out the themes of living. Absorbed by these contrasts, Ruth made a crucial suggestion: a culture pattern may entirely exclude certain attitudes and behaviors so that, not on the "segment," these do not even negatively affect individuals. Told of suicide, the Zuili listened politely, then laughed.

There would always be in all cultures individuals unable to take the available channels: the suicide in Norwich (an act condemned by Ruth Fulton's grandparents and praised in books she read), the bitterly weeping Zufii, the gently grieving Dobuan. And such individuals "have all the problems of the aberrant everywhere." There were always people who did not fit.

"Cultures in which these abnormals function at ease and with honor"

"Just as those are favoured whose congenial responses are closest to that behaviour which characterizes their society, so those are disoriented whose congenial responses fall in that arc of behaviour which is not capitalized by their culture. These abnormals are those who are not supported by the institutions of their civilizations." Ruth Benedict's phrases in the last chapter of Patterns of Culture have an intensity and poignancy revealing a more than disciplinary interest in her subject. Her protagonist in chapter 8 is the "disoriented" person whose "characteristic reactions are denied validity" and who faces a "chasm between them and the cultural pattern." She had long mulled over the problem of normal and abnormal, and she published an article nearly simultaneously with Patterns of Culture, "Anthropology and the Abnormal."

The last two chapters of Patterns of Culture focus on the individual in society. In her conclusions, Ruth not only completed the logic of the previous six chapters but introduced ideas and approaches central to her subsequent work and to the work of anthropologists from 1934 to the present. In these chapters, too, she revealed the grounds of her commitment to ethnographic inquiry. She asked how far an individual might depart from expected standards of behavior and of temperament without being ostracized, tortured, driven insane. In answering the question, Ruth Benedict embarked on a comparative evaluation of cultures in terms of permitted variations.

She phrased the dilemma as one of creativity versus congeniality. Her book illustrated the dynamic quality of individual encounters with culture, the constant "creating" necessary to cultural survival. The self, Ruth knew, strained against conventions while depending on these for making sense of experience. The challenge was to accept convention yet fully realize self-integrity. "But no anthropologist with a background of experience of other cultures has ever believed that individuals were automatons, mechanically carrying out the decrees of their civilization." Being congenial, she said, did not mean conforming into self-obliterating passivity. Individuals do not drown in "an overpowering ocean" of custom, although every action, every decision, every intimate mood is colored by custom. A culture, she said, can be intricately patterned without submerging the component individualities. In a more venturesome vein, Ruth Benedict hinted that the intricately patterned culture might show the greatest tolerance for diversity.

The "passionately thought," not very disguised message of the book was that in other places, in other times, being congenial had other meanings. This was the hinge of a multiple-stranded argument. Ruth wrote her book and the article to controvert assumptions of "natural" human behavior, universal "personality types," and permanency of customs. In the process she showed how branding a "type" unnatural could lead to madness, neurosis, irreconcilable conflict.

Sexual and religious experiences were her prime examples for the varying definitions of normal and abnormal from society to society. One can speculate on the private impulses behind these publicly expedient choices. Sex and sexual behavior were popular topics in the 1920s, and Ruth never denied her desire for a wide audience.

When the homosexual response is regarded as a perversion, however, the invert is immediately exposed to all the conflicts to which aberrants are always exposed. His guilt, his sense of inadequacy, his failures, are consequences of the disrepute which social tradition visits upon him, and few people can achieve a satisfactory life unsupported by the standards of their society. The adjustments that society demands of them would strain any man's vitality.

Society, not biology, produces the "aberrant" individual, frail and "useless to society." Ruth's version of cultureover-nature went with another point: culture can be changed.

Religious trance was her other example. "Trance is a similar [to homosexuality] abnormality in our society." Like the homosexual, according to Ruth Benedict the religious mystic had been branded "abnormal" and therefore became "neurotic and psychotic." With religion, she had chosen another biographically weighted subject to bolster her case for an enlightened, sensitive, and respectful social psychiatry.

For the moment, however (and this shifted over the next ten years), Ruth concerned herself less with cross-cultural psychiatry than with the intolerance of "abnormal" and marginal individuals which she detected in American society.

"He is an arid and suspicious fellow"

The force of custom (i.e., culture) had a positive side. Throughout Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict attempted to persuade readers of the possibilities and the mechanisms for changing the conditions under which they lived. Customs, she argued, are historical, arbitrary, and controllable. Her efforts had a personal motivation: "I can't swallow the solution in Plato's Republic," she had written more than ten years earlier. And the translation of mysticism into the approved channel of poetry no longer satisfied her. Anne Singleton expressed "visions" for a while; by 1930 the woman and writer reached for a wider audience, a more public statement. Ruth Benedict spoke about diverse societies to her own complex, and she thought constricted, society.

Exactly because of the personal motive and because Ruth was a persistently private person, she couched her pleas for change under the general rubric of "social engineering." The concept, if controversial, also struck a familiar chord for professional and lay readers of the time.

Ruth Benedict accommodated her "social engineering" to the ideas of John Dewey, to progressivism, and to a liberal-humanism that recalled Matthew Arnold and the nineteenth century. Social engineering, in her view, operated through the individual and through the individual's enlightened attitudes toward himself and—inseparably—toward his society. A teacher all her life, Ruth knew how attitudes should be changed. Offered the "right kind" of information, an individual would naturally take it upon himself or herself to alter a perspective, to expand horizons and rearrange circumstances. In Patterns of Culture Ruth presented the "right" information in ethnographic portraits that were unmistakable reflections of her own society. Experience convinced her that knowing self was a result of continuing contrast and comparison.

Ruth Benedict chose the Dobuan and Kwakiutl cultures because, she told Mead, she could talk to their ethnographers. She also chose the two cultures because each echoed American society in a particular way. That echo constituted another aspect of her comparative approach; differences cannot be so great as to make unrecognizable the alternative ways of meeting basic human needs.

[In her novel The Waves] Virginia Woolf composed a central persona from the reflections of six other characters; their voices created the "arid and suspicious fellow," Percival. Ruth similarly drew American culture from the images and reflections of three other cultures. She described the Dobuans so they sounded like American Puritans: stingy, prudish, suspicious—in a word, paranoiac. The Kwakiutl, in many ways the most vivid figure in Patterns of Culture, resembled a side of American character that Ruth Benedict inclined toward while acknowledging her own stronger puritanical streak. The ebullient Kwakiutl stood for a spirit of greed, accumulation, confidence, encompassing ego—the megalomaniac trend in American society and the foundation of American "free enterprise." Like Walt Whitman, whose ebullient and greedy poetry Ruth admired, the Kwakiutl risked his pride to embrace experience, and Ruth envied the "ecstasy." She wrote of Whitman's "unwavering, ringing belief that the ME … is of untold worth and importance."

The Zuiii represented a potential, a goal for the culture built on the schizophrenic traits of puritanism and expansiveness. Ruth perceived in Pueblo life an ideal, a reference for America's future. She did not envision Utopia in the Pueblos; she emphasized traits out of which her contemporaries might create a better way at home. Nor did she recreate a portrait of herself in "The Pueblos of New Mexico" (really "The Zuilis of New Mexico"). Ruth admired the Pueblo design and did not hesitate to convey her admiration. But she did not read into the Pueblos her own "ideal virtues"; rather, she stressed in Pueblo life examples for careful melioration in American society.

The portraits resulting from the author's determination to open her readers' eyes onto themselves might be (often are) called one-dimensional. The portraits are not "flat." Ruth Benedict vividly and emphatically presented each unique type and, as vividly, an unmistakable contrast. She summarized her intentions for Houghton Mifflin:

She has chosen three strongly contrasting primitive cultures, and described them in all their customs, from the way they plant their yams, or divorce their husbands, or go headhunting at death, as well-knit and internally consistent attitudes toward life. The details of their behavior have great intrinsic interest because of their striking character.

She expected, too, that her readers ordinarily saw the world in such sharp characterizations. Ruth was not far off; through a parade of epic figures from Puritan divines and witch-burners, through Paul Bunyan and Jesse James, to the Babbits of her own century, Americans realized their culture values in personality types. Ruth brought to her discipline a common-sense perception, and articulation, of culture pattern through individual type.

She chose the Dobu, Kwakiutl, and Zufli cultures carefully, and equally carefully a vocabulary that would be immediately evocative—as recognizable as Paul Bunyan and Lewis Babbitt. Nietzsche's words bordered on the esoteric, but Ruth found his phrasings overwhelmingly persuasive. "The basic contrast between the Pueblos and the other cultures of North America is the contrast that is named and described by Nietzsche in his studies of Greek tragedy," she wrote, and happily included several quotations. She knew his contrast "on her pulses" as well as intellectually.

One December 3, probably 1930 (a diarist remembers the year), Ruth Benedict wrote:

By the time I was eight I knew what Dionysian experience was, I had had to take account of fury, an experience that swept over me from somewhere outside my control—as I figured [?]—, lifted me like a tornado and dropped me limp at the end. But I'd also got also [sic] by that time my great response to this violence, and it was disgust. After a periodic scene I was likely to vomit.…

And she went on, in an extraordinarily Dionysian vein.

Disgust at excessive gestures and uncontrolled responses turned Ruth toward the Apollonian—the remembered calm of her dead father's face. She herself rarely achieved a "true" Apollonian attitude; she insisted upon the "moderation and measure" in Zuffi society almost in compensation. Zufli culture did "objectify" a version of Ruth's dream, an order of life she admired. But she did not make up the Zuffi or imagine the relentless regularity and controlled ceremonialism. Before and since, visitors to the Pueblo have described these qualities, and if Ruth focused on ritualized expressions because of resonance to her private perceptions she also did so out of professional ambitiousness. Competing with colleagues, she wanted her book to achieve a unique standing.

The material available on Pueblo Indians when Ruth wrote seemed either so full of detail or so narrowly analytic as to obscure any sense of what these people were truly like. Ruth recreated the personality of Pueblo culture, an identifiable and integral entity that was perfectly distinct from her own culture and objectively distinct from her private values.

In many ways, in fact, the Dionysian more than the Apollonian "mirrored" the author. Dionysian objectified Ruth's wishes and suggested a strongly compelling motive of her life and her career. The Dionysian appeared mainly in poetry and in journals, and then insistently. "There is only one problem in life: that fire upon our flesh shall burn as a knife that cuts to the bone, and joy strip us like a naked blade."

The non-Nietzschean terms, paranoiac and megalomaniac, are farther from Ruth's private mode of interpretation. She expected her readers to recognize the popularized Freudian terms and from these form a lasting impression of Dobuan and Kwakiutl cultures. Ruth Benedict presented her protagonists so they would stick in her readers' minds. "People need to be told in words of two syllables what contrasting cultures mean," she told Reo Fortune. By "need" she referred to her ameliorative aim; with eyes opened to diverse constructs of life, people would engineer, reconstruct, the design of their own lives.

If Ruth thought her readers needed two-syllable words and graphic descriptions, she also had faith that these readers would become "the culture-conscious," the aware and self-critical individuals she trusted to change American society and (perhaps) the world.

"Men are never inventive enough to make more than minute changes"

Ruth Benedict wrote for an America over the "zesty" optimism of the 1920s and ready for the suspicious, stingy, tight-belted atmosphere of a depressed economy. Given the impending economic crisis, her Zuffi example takes on special meaning, an alternative to Dobuan malicious possessiveness and to Kwakiutl "conspicuous consumption." Zuffi culture also offered an alternative to the Marxism embraced by several friends and colleagues.

In the chapter titled "The Pueblos of New Mexico" the anthropologist made a statement about social policy, grounded in a liberal-progressive humanism. Ruth counted on individuals to move from envisioning to engineering alternatives. In her book the Zuili are a persuasive alternative, a lesson in cooperativeness and harmony of interests that is hard to resist. But Ruth did not impose her lesson. From teaching she knew that a chosen lesson was a lasting one; she only tried to make the choice inevitable. With the Zufii she described a culture of proportion and fairness where no one starved and no one was judged by property or power. She also described a culture sure of itself and well-enough integrated to avoid being destroyed by a dominant white culture.

"The Pueblos of New Mexico" bore a substantial burden. The chapter demonstrated the rightness of aspects of Zufli culture and presented a set of images that would make agreement with the author powerfully "logical." But chapter 4 was one version of a many-sided argument, directed to a range of readers. Ruth Benedict did write a pedagogical anthropology; she thought of her discipline in terms of an audience to be instructed—the individuals "in the street" who, startled into awareness, worked toward an improved society. "Where else could any trait come from except from the behaviour of a man or a woman or a child?"

This belief in the power of every human being to recreate, repeatedly, the terms of existence underlay Ruth's humanism and her anthropological approach. Her faith in individualized and revisionary change prompted her support of New Deal policies and a hope that Franklin Roosevelt would prove congenial to American culture, spokesman for "dominant motives," and therefore an effective innovator. But she postponed discussion of these and other political issues until after her book was safely published and out, in bookstores all over the country. "Even Macy in this city does not have the book in stock, as every person I know who ordered one has waited ten days to have the order filled."

Ruth Benedict had constructed, implicitly, another heroic personage: the informed, creative individual who, understanding patterns, successfully altered surroundings. In the face of leaders like Hitler and Mussolini—men who seemed "congenial" to their cultures and times—Ruth even more strenuously counted on "common people" and "sanely directed change." Books like hers had to sell, and she made no effort to hide from friends and editors her intense desire that Patterns of Culture sell and sell widely. Her concern led to discussions of title, jacket color, and price, as well as to several revisions of publicity blurbs. At Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet patiently answered urgent and irritable letters.

The title took considerable time and thought, Ruth not knowing that the phrase she settled on would be ineradicably associated with her name. She did not pick "patterns" right away. "I've turned over titles and titles. I want the title of the book to clearly indicate that my competence is in anthropology, nothing else. That is, I don't want any psychologizing title. I shall suggest 'Primitive Peoples: An Introduction to Cultural Types.'" This August 1932 version nearly implied an equivalence: the isomorphism of "peoples" and "cultural types" Ruth tried to avoid in the text of the book. The links between "peoples" and "types" are part of the book and are implied finally by "patterns."

The early version may well have sounded pompous and pedantic. Ruth insisted upon the accessibility of her material, a priority as strong as that she be thought competent in anthropology; she had to keep both professional and popular audiences in mind.

I have turned over in my mind some fifty titles for the book, and I find I have the strongest possible preference for a title as exact as possible under the circumstances.… Would you consider "Patterns of Culture"? "Patterns" has been used in the sense I have in mind and it is besides a pleasant English word.

Years earlier the "crowd" at Columbia had talked about "patterns." A small group of Boas students discussed patterns of behavior, of personality, of everyday interactions—an array of arrangements and habits both interand intrapersonal that reflected and confirmed the dominant values of culture. The word "pattern" stood for the ordering of a culture and the patterning in individual lives. Ruth and her friends added the "patterning" of words, in poetry and (with less enthusiasm by Ruth) in language itself: the creating of a coherent and comprehensible statement. They added process to stasis, and Ruth's word referred not just to "shape" but to "shaping."

Ruth considered several words more or less synonymous with pattern, especially "integrity" and "configuration"—or if not synonymous at least filling out the connotations of "pattern." For her book, it seems clear from letters, pattern had the special attraction of being a commonsense word with a strong link to poetry and art. Unlike the "configuration" of her 1932 article, pattern evoked responses that, she hoped, would carry without laboring a complex argument. Common-sense understandings of the word do clarify the anthropological meaning and to some extent relieved Ruth from having precisely to define her word. (Others later took up and all-too-thoroughly disputed the definitional issue.)

She meant by "pattern" what most people mean, a formal arrangement based on a theme or tendency. Theme can be considered interchangeable with propensity and motive; the Apollonian motive is a theme of Pueblo culture. Around a theme, pieces fall into place over time. The existing pattern determines the quality and structure of internal elements and, as well, the incorporation of new traits. Grammar and vocabulary come to mind, but Ruth Benedict preferred to relate her word to psychology and poetry. "A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. Within each culture there come into being characteristic purposes not necessarily shared by other types of society." These frequently quoted sentences might be rephrased: the integrity of a culture and of an individual lies in the "unfolding" of pattern according to dominant tendencies, over time and uniquely—Ruth did not slight the biographical and historical past tense of a present constellation.

Patterning referred to culture and to personality at once. This way Ruth suggested a mutually creative connection and a similarity in type between culture and person. She did not explain the connection in Patterns of Culture, except to say that individual character and actions followed culture patterns, and that the individual with more awareness of patterning could change himself and his surroundings. Ruth Benedict dealt in implications and assumptions; personal patterns reiterated culture patterns in content (what they were) and in form (how they came about and worked). Pattern also recalled Ruth's claim that individual personalities fit cultural types while retaining an idiosyncratic response, the distinctiveness of component pieces without which there could be no pattern. Again common sense illuminates the anthropological point.

Most broadly, Ruth Benedict talked about an aesthetic dimension in human life. She talked about the yearnings for order and the satisfactions in a coherent and selective presentation. She had appreciated the comprehensibility and strengths of a well-constructed statement. She applied similar standards to a person (who did not chafe against cultural expectations yet maintained self-integrity), to a poem (which used traditional forms to express innovative perceptions), and to a culture. Underlying all these judgments was Ruth's belief in the importance of making sense of existence and arranging—often wonderfully—the natural and supernatural forces that impinged upon any "living."

Poetic references were not accidental. In 1934 Reo Fortune, prompted by Margaret Mead, asked Ruth whether she had borrowed "patterns" from Amy Lowell's poem of that name. "I walk down the patterned garden path / In my stiff brocaded gown. / With my powdered hair and jewelled fan, /I too am a rare pattern.…" In her lines, Lowell conveyed a message about boundaries and taming and the end of desire that Ruth must have understood personally, whatever she thought critically. Edward Sapir disliked the poem: "'Patterns' is piffle, like much of Amy's work," he told Robert Lowie in 1917. Ruth undoubtedly knew Amy Lowell's poetry. Whether she considered "Patterns" to be "piffle" is not known, nor is her answer to Fortune's question. One can only guess at her memories when she chose "pattern" for the book. Aesthetic connotations did influence her decision, whatever their source.

The aesthetic introduced an ethical dimension. Ruth consistently and self-consciously used the word "integrity"; she implied in pattern a kind of "truthfulness" of being, honesty in a sound arrangement. For Ruth the scattered and haphazard culture seemed not "neurotic" (as critics said) but literally of less integrity (one remembers Sapir's "genuine and spurious"). She drew this insight from her experiences—her dislike of the "random"—and in subsequent years refined notions of "soundness" in person, in culture, and in relationships between the two. She retained, as well, the cross-cultural perspective of chapter 8, making untenable any absolute definition of the "well-integrated" personality and any fixed definition of the ideal environment for personal development. (The consequences of varying cultural tolerances for diversity became a major focus of her later writings.)

"Pattern," then, had not been lightly chosen. The word contained a wealth of meanings, some outlined and some merely hinted at in the 1934 book. Ruth apparently liked the encompassing and connotative quality of the word. Supplementing the common-sense and the poetic references, the word also referred to her ongoing self-interpretations. "It is curious to see how the basic patterns of our life hold from babyhood to decrepitude." Ruth eventually settled on "pattern" with a feeling of satisfaction; she kept the word for her 1946 book on Japanese culture.

The title stood out nicely on the turquoise-blue jacket, a color achieved after some negotiation. "The color of the back-strip paster I should much prefer in some more saturated color," she wrote to "My dear Mr. Greenslet" in June 1934; "this seems too light a turquoise, and difficult to read the printing on it in the bookcase. I am clipping onto this letter a slip of paper that seems to be more nearly the right tone." She wanted a bright Southwestern turquoise. She had other demands. The spelling should be British, not American.., th e price should be as low as possible … And she asked about distribution. "I have received another letter from California saying that my books are not available there. This letter is from a person very used to purchasing books in Southern California.…" The publicity should be precise: she was an anthropologist, a present, "not former" (her emphasis), editor of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, "Mrs." not "Miss" Benedict. When asked, however, to write a brief biographical sketch, she withdrew. "Be a darling and do this for me," she scrawled across a letter from Greenslet and sent it to Margaret Mead.

Mead may have done the favor. She did publicize the book, in conversations, reviews, and comments. Her reviews acknowledged the dual audience Ruth projected. Mead praised Patterns of Culture for contributing to anthropological theory and method as well as for determining the contours of everyday thought. Acutely, Margaret Mead recognized that readers of Patterns of Culture would make "culture a household word," and use the concept in their daily conversations. These were the "Macy shoppers," the ordinary men and women who, according to Ruth Benedict, created a culture. Other anthropologists wrote favorable reviews—and Boas a guardedly pleased, short introduction. Some colleagues dismissed the book entirely, as poetry not social science. Few, even those most positive about the book, tried to do what Mead did not merge the "poetic," imaginative content with the anthropological argument of the book. Kroeber came the closest, since he like Mead understood the "impressions" not as fluffbut as essential to the logic of Patterns of Culture. He praised the book, in a remarkably apt if awkward phrase, for its "quality of distinctive, almost passionately felt, balanced thinking precisely expressed."

Lively debate about the book lasted for well over ten years. Ruth's colleagues seemed unable to let go of Patterns of Culture, picking at its thesis, doubting the accuracy of ethnographic accounts, questioning the woman's method and her role in anthropological thought, and probably above all envying the style and success of the book. One of the most popular anthropology books of the twentieth century, Ruth's Patterns of Culture inspired more than small twinges of envy and rivalry. Readers throughout the world remember the Zufli, the Dobu Islander, the Kwakiutl Indian, if not the revision of the "functional approach" or the argument about cross-cultural psychiatry. Readers remember the distinct contrasts and the vivid possibilities for arranging human life, if not a "comparative method" or the meaning of "typology" in Ruth Benedict's book. Finally, too, readers of Patterns of Culture must recognize that an existing state of affairs is neither permanent nor perfect nor inevitable.

Patterns of Culture established an intellectual attitude and conveyed an optimism about the ability of individuals to change their lives—a lesson from the author's life and badly needed in the 1930s. Ruth Benedict transmitted a powerful principle through the concrete data of her crosscultural examples. The book, perhaps, conveyed more optimism than the author felt.