SOURCE: "Patterns of Culture: Between America and Anthropology," in Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land, University of Texas Press, 1989, pp. 206-40.

[Caffrey is an American anthropologist. In the following excerpt from her biography of Benedict, she assesses the impact that Patterns of Culture exerted on anthropology as a developing field of study.]

Patterns of Culture had a multiple impact on American thought. It acted as a signal of and a catalyst for the final acceptance of a profound paradigm change in the social sciences and in American society and set in place the new twentieth-century paradigm or world view which had been taking shape up to that time. In clear, compelling language Benedict drew together the scattered new ideas, filtered them through her own thinking and experience, and articulated a coherent social philosophy, a new set of axioms people could use to give direction to their lives and thoughts. In writing a book about configurations among primitive peoples, Benedict was covertly giving her readers a new underlying configuration for American culture based on the new values and beliefs. As a cornerstone of the new configuration, for the general educated public at large and for the other social sciences as well the book culminated the decade-long debate over biology versus culture. At the beginning of the decade biology was firmly entrenched as the primary motivator of humanity. Biological determinism allowed no leeway for change. One could not change one's gender, or the effects of one's hormones, or one's genes. Social change seemed possible only through rigorous, often cruel, weeding out of the "unfit." Benedict's demonstration of the overwhelming role of culture in creating three different lifestyles, those of the Zuili, the Dobu, and the Kwakiutl, provided the final important evidence for replacing biology with culture as the major causal factor in human life. But she did not, like Kroeber, rule out the role of biology altogether in a strict cultural determinism. Instead she spoke of "the small scope of biologically transmitted behaviour, and the enormous role of the cultural process." Culture, unlike biology, carried within it the potential for and openness toward individual and social change. For culture, though largely unconscious, was human-made and could be modified to suit social demands once the forces of culture were made conscious. Culture seemed the key to a better, more desirable future world. The force of Benedict's argument was helped by the excessive ideas of the eugenics movement in the United States by 1934 and the bigoted policies abroad based on supposed racial and biological differences, especially the inferiority and superiority of certain peoples.

As a second important element of the new world view, for the general educated public at large Patterns both parodied the values of Victorian America and affirmed the end of that era's influence by replacing its absolute, universal standards with cultural relativity. Both Dobu and Kwakiutl were cultures that honored the worst excesses of the Victorian robber-baron mind-set. Dobu gave a central place to theft, cheating, and treachery toward others as ways to succeed in life. The Kwakiutl stressed self-glorification, arrogance, and the consequent humiliation of others. Like Victorian America, Dobu stressed excessive prudery and fostered sexual jealousy and suspicion. Among the Kwakiutl, marriage was a business proposition, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman insisted it had been for many nineteenth-century women. These were cultures Americans could only perceive as paranoid and megalomaniac, Benedict wrote, yet her readers could see the parallels with American society. The absolute standards of Victorian America had fostered the worst excesses of American society, her writing implied. They led to extreme selfishness, as in Dobu, or to the excesses of consumer culture, as among the Kwakiutl. In their place she offered the standard of cultural relativity. Each culture developed its own different goals and standards out of a universal pool of possibilities. There could therefore be no "right" or "wrong" standards, she wrote, thus affirming ethical relativity as well. For most people relativity had meant uncertainty, the potential for chaos. But Benedict made cultural relativity a positive quality, one consistent in important ways with the old goals and values of American society. "Much profit and enjoyment," she wrote, could come from "relations with peoples of different standards" once Americans understood and respected other cultures' mores. She framed the differences in terms of a great arc of possible human interests from which each culture selected those to emphasize, just as language picked a finite number of sounds from an almost unlimited set of possibilities, or individuals developed their own personalities from the potentials available to them. "The possible human institutions and motives are legion," she wrote, and "wisdom consists in a greatly increased tolerance toward their divergencies." This idea of tolerance and acceptance of others lay close to Jesus' command to "Love one another," and in line with the American acceptance of different peoples to its shores. She emphasized that with cultural relativity there could still be standards and order, not necessarily chaos.

To those struggling for a Modern perception of the world, Benedict's greatest contribution to the new world view was her answer to the great problem of Chaos-—not an acceptance merely of social dissonance, or the negation of dissonance in a fixed, ordered, and artificial system, but the coexistence of Chaos and Order, as in the paintings of the Cubists, or Modern poetry. Hers was not a closed system. "It would be absurd to cut every culture down to the Procrustean bed of some catchword characterization," she said. She called nothing more unfortunate "than an effort to characterize all cultures as exponents of a limited number of fixed and selected types." She accepted the existence of dissonance. Not all cultures achieved a "balanced and rhythmic pattern." Some scattered; for them "lack of integration" seemed as characteristic as extreme integration did for others. But even in these cases she suggested an underlying order; dissonance due to a culture's bordering between two or more strong cultures; historical factors such as movement into a different culture's area or the influence of a newly migrated tribe on cultures in an area. Even in the most "disoriented" cultures, she wrote, one could follow "accommodations that tend to rule out disharmonious elements and establish selected elements more securely." Or, she suggested, the possibility existed that the description of the culture was disoriented, not the culture itself. Or "the nature of the integration may be merely outside our experience and difficult to perceive." Sustaining her acceptance of chaos was the belief that there existed underlying order, that within dissonance lay patterns which, if we were only acute enough to perceive them, could reorder our perspective of reality and create a new view of the universe, take people a step beyond the place where they were at that time and place. "Cultures," she wrote, "are more than the sum of their traits." They possess "new potentialities," a new level of complexity not present in their elements, and the same elements in other combinations behave differently. She, more clearly than any of her contemporaries, managed to reconcile the philosophical opposites of her day, and gave her readers a base from which to launch their own elaborations of the new paradigm. She suggested the possibility of a philosophy of the coexistence of Chaos and Order in the integration of seeming cultural dissonance.

Next, for the social sciences and society in general, she dealt with the question of the individual in society. She condemned the nineteenth-century view and advocated a new view of the relationship between the individual and society. They were not antagonists, she wrote, as a misleading "nineteenth-century dualism" proclaimed. Because of this old idea of the conflict of the individual and society, "emphasis upon cultural behaviour" was often interpreted as denial of individual autonomy. What should be stressed, she wrote, was the pattern of "mutual reinforcement" between the two. This idea of individualism, an "unselfish" individualism, formed part of the new twentieth-century American paradigm. To the question of whether individuals changed society or were locked in step with it, she answered that again there was no dualism. Influence flowed both ways. Most people were influenced by culture but had no trouble fitting into it. But some individuals temperamentally were not in tune with their culture and therefore could not accept its standards and goals. She made no judgment of rightness or wrongness. She only described these people as different and implied that they could stop blaming themselves for their inability to fit into society.

As a corollary to the new paradigm she affirmed the relativity of normality, making a clear statement against homophobia in American society. Western culture tended "to regard even a mild homosexual as an abnormal," she wrote. The clinical picture of homosexuality stressed neuroses and psychoses arising from it and the "inadequate functioning of the invert." But looking at other cultures showed that homosexuals had functioned well and even been especially acclaimed, as in Plato's Republic. When homosexuality was regarded as perversion, she wrote, the person involved became exposed to conflicts. "His guilt, his sense of inadequacy, his failures" thus were actually the result of "the disrepute which social tradition visits upon him." She added, "Few people can achieve a satisfactory life unsupported by the standards of the society." She suggested that other means of dealing with misfits' alienation from society existed beyond "insisting that they adopt the modes that are alien to them." On one hand, the misfits could objectively learn more about their own preferences and how to live with and deal with their "deviation from the type." Learning how much their troubles were due to lack of social support, they could educate themselves to accept their difference, and achieve "a more independent and less tortured" existence. Second, education of society to tolerance needed to go hand in hand with individual self-education. In making these assertions concerning homosexuality, however, she was careful to use other examples of deviation with it, such as trance, and insisted on having her name on the cover page as Mrs. Ruth Benedict, even though she and Stanley had been separated for four years. Thus she brought to bear on what she had to say not only the authority of science and academia, but also her covert authority in American life as a married woman.

Benedict's philosophy in Patterns of Culture, besides the other purposes it fulfilled, remained true to a feminist vision. In stressing the importance of culture and the relativity of cultural practices, Benedict laid the base for a reevaluation of relationships between men and women. If masculine and feminine were perceived as biological, then women could not escape the weakness and inferiority inherent in being female. But if masculinity and femininity were cultural, that is, learned behavior, then women's weaknesses were not inherent, but culturally learned, and could be changed. In the examples that she used of relationships between the sexes among primitive peoples she suggested alternative possible ways for men and women to relate to each other. The implied message was that American ways were not set in concrete—they should be questioned and if necessary changed. The Zuiji, for example, were a matrilineal culture in which women owned and inherited all properties and their husbands worked for them, a radical departure from typical United States male-oriented practices. Benedict talked of the ease of divorce among the Zufii, the implication being that divorce did not have to be the traumatic experience it was in American society. She wrote of the Dobu, who lived one year with the wife's clan, where she dominated the household, and the next year with the husband's clan, where he dominated. She described the Kwakiutl, with whom inheritance was also matrilineal, but went to the husband of a daughter, and women were bartered like property among men to gain status and power. In choosing these and other examples, Benedict wanted her readers to stop and think about their own culture in contrast and give themselves permission, through the alternate possibilities of anthropology, to free themselves from their own conventional or stereotyped ways of thinking about men and women and to search for new ones.

Patterns of Culture did not initiate the trend but it confirmed anthropology as a source of moral authority in American life, superseding natural history. When one needed the aid of a pithy example to make a point, one would turn not to the insect or mammal worlds as at the turn of the century, but to the case of a "primitive society," and what happened in such societies became intimately linked to the happenings of American life.

The book had a "wave effect" in American culture. The first wave washed over a comparatively small group of people: leaders in the social sciences and among the general educated public who had been groping toward the expression of the new twentieth-century paradigm and for whom Patterns acted as a centering device to bring its elements together. Through these people the ideas of Patterns became the guiding principles for a new perspective of the world which became the underlying beliefs of the intellectual community. The second wave began in 1946, when Patterns was published as a twenty-five-cent paperback, and when it became "one of the first true anthropological best-sellers in this country." With this Patterns moved out of the intellectual community and into the consciousness of the mass reading public. In this way Benedict's ideas truly became "common coin" in the American psyche.

Among her colleagues, Benedict's approach was daring and novel. It took great courage to reintroduce subjectivity as a working tool for anthropologists, since they had spent the first twenty years of the century discrediting it. To the "scientifically minded" it seemed like the introduction of potential chaos into anthropology, with a resulting threat to soundness. But it was a subjective approach based on the verifiable facts of a culture's way of life, a subjectivity that gave promise of actually working to make cultures comprehensible. Some anthropologists saw Patterns as a step toward making their discipline a truly predictive science. If one can have a basic idea of why people act the way they do, as the configuration approach seemed to promise, one can then predict with a fair measure of success which programs they would accept or how they as a people would react to an issue—a necessary preliminary to workable social engineering. Patterns became a catalyst of the Culture and Personality movement in anthropology. But within the discipline the book marked a clear split for the rest of the decade and beyond between what Kroeber, writing in 1934, called "scientific" and "historical" anthropologists.

For Ruth Benedict personally, Patterns of Culture represented a summation of the meaning of her life to that point. But it also marked a path into the future: for America, for anthropology, and for herself.

By the mid-1930's Culture and Personality (C&P) studies had become a legitimate field of interest, bolstered by the support of the Social Science Research Council Committee on Personality and Culture and the National Research Council Committee on Culture and Personality, chaired by Edward Sapir. C&P studies had begun institutionally with Sapir's seminar on Culture and Personality at Yale in the fall of 1931, when he first introduced psychoanalytic ideas to anthropology students in an integrated way with the help of psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, who commuted once a week from New York to participate. A showcase seminar in 1932-1933 sponsored by Rockefeller Foundation money generated through the interest of Lawrence Frank gave Sapir the opportunity to conduct his Culture and Personality class for a group of scholars chosen from various European countries. It provided a convincing display of the ability of C&P research to attract big money and tackle serious problems which influenced later SSRC [Social Science Research Council] and NRC [National Research Council] acceptance.

But the earliest signal event in the emergence of the Culture and Personality movement was the presentation of Ruth Benedict's "Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest" in 1928. "Psychological Types" and later "Configurations of Culture in North America" were the first papers to use psychological ideas to make anthropological sense in a major way. Previous writers had floundered trying to integrate a basically individual-oriented, biologically rooted psychology with group-oriented, culturally rooted anthropology. Benedict's idea of culture as "personality writ large" pointed a direction anthropologists could follow, a theoretical approach that reached its greatest development in Patterns of Culture. But Patterns of Culture, after its initial favorable reception, precipitated to the surface a debate that had been latent through the 1920's on what kind of discipline anthropology was and should be. This identity struggle appeared in three different ways: a debate over whether anthropology should consider itself as primarily "historical" or "scientific"; a debate over whether a functional or a structural approach was more important; and, within C&P itself, the question of which was more important—the individual or the culture in which he or she was enmeshed.

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, anthropology in America had developed under Boas to consider itself a "historical science." By this anthropologists meant that they saw their discipline as a "science plus." Science was foremost. Anthropology's roots were in the biological sciences, and physical anthropology was definitely an experimental science in which hypotheses could be proposed and validated in mathematical terms. Ethnology had become scientific through its meticulous and scrupulous collection of masses of raw data and its attention to observable phenomena and to what they revealed rather than to the creation of largely unfounded generalizations common to the nineteenth-century "unscientific" anthropologists. Ethnology had attained scientific objectivity by refraining from direct value judgments on various cultures and from indirect value judgments through the comparison of cultures, both weaknesses of the nineteenth-century anthropologists. In the study of diffusion and the possibility of convergence anthropologists examined processes which held possibilities of explanation and prediction. In the analysis of cultural phenomena into their component parts, anthropologists hoped to be able to discover basic regularities or "laws" of culture as physics and chemistry had done in the inorganic world. The "plus" consisted of two principles concerning space and time taken from history to help the new scientists deal with the unstable human phenomena of their discipline. The first was an insistence that phenomena could not be torn out of their context and used to "prove" positions, as had been done by the nineteenth-century anthropologists. Information always had to be dealt with in context. The second was respect for phenomena as the end result of a sequence of events through time and the necessity of understanding as much of that sequence as was discoverable, by doing as much historical reconstruction as possible. As a result of this approach, Boas and his students were termed, somewhat misleadingly, the "historical school" of anthropology, or the users of a "historical approach."

With the declaration of independence from biological science in the early 1920's and the focus on the ambiguous concept of culture as the material of their discipline, ethnologists set themselves on a collision course with their own standards. To deal with "culture," if it were not to be seen as an endless array of haphazard items, meant opening the Pandora's box of interpretation, comparison, weighing values, all the heresies of the nineteenth century that anthropologists had learned to distrust. For a time this conflict was obscured by the necessity of defining culture and its component parts. But by the late 1920's rumblings had begun within the discipline. By that time it was also becoming apparent that historical reconstruction which relied on the study of diffusion had played itself out and convergence had proved an intellectual dead end. Anthropologists had come to feel the need for some kind of integrative approach to make culture coalesce, to deal with culture as a whole. There was a sense of identity crisis: where do we go from here as a discipline?

With Patterns of Culture the identity crisis came out into the open. In responding to the book anthropologists also revealed the way they identified themselves and their discipline and the struggle between various points of view concerning new hopes and old fears. Patterns of Culture taught the potential of integrative studies in anthropology. But it also served to reinforce the threat that with them anthropology would lose its status as a science and would fall back into the speculative philosophical realm of the nineteenth-century anthropologists it had spent the last quarter of a century totally discounting. To those who saw the potential, Patterns of Culture was an inspiration. They discounted its faults as endemic to any pioneer work, took Benedict's ideas as a direction in which to search for answers, and tried to go on from there. To those who saw mainly the threat, Benedict's work was "unscientific," too subjective, too vague, too interpretive. To an extreme fringe of this second group Benedict seemed a "delusionist" with obsessive investment in her idea, distorting or manipulating facts to support her stance.

The configuration theory of Patterns of Culture was extremely influential in anthropology. It established the principle that it was legitimate to deal with culture wholes and gave a working model for doing so, from which others could establish their own working models. For many anthropologists, as Morris Opler later wrote, Benedict's work was "liberating" and a "refreshing influence" on American anthropology. Moreover, while it was a step into the future it retained ties with anthropology as a "historical science." Franz Boas had written in his introduction to her book, "The interest in these sociopsychological problems is not in any way opposed to the historical approach." Boas had the reputation of quickly popping intellectual bubbles and withering practitioners of fragile speculative thinking with a glance. His approval gave assurance that there was substance to Benedict's work and added to the confidence of those who used Benedict's ideas to kindle their own.

Within anthropology, some spent time clarifying the configuration concept and making it more precise. Ralph Linton, for example, in The Study of Man (1936) broke down culture patterns into three types: universals, specialties, and alternatives. Universals were common to all adult members of a culture. Specialties meant traits or habits shared by a group within a culture but not by the whole culture. Alternatives were those ways used by individuals within a culture which gave different paths for achieving the same ends. John Gillin at the University of Utah wrote an article called "The Configuration Problem in Culture" (1936), defining configurations more clearly as to their properties, types, how they changed, the relations of configurations and their parts, why anthropology needed them, and possible directions of major configurational research.

One major focus of research, directly inspired by Benedict's section on the Zufli in Patterns of Culture, was the delineation and analysis of "ideal" and "real" patterns: cultural ideals versus actual behavior within a culture. The paradox of Zuiii was that although knowledgeable observers besides Benedict agreed that as a culture it stressed order, restraint, and communal over individual effort, as a society it was rife with factionalism, and acts of disorder by individuals were not unknown. Columbia graduate student Irving Goldman wrote about the Zufli for Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples (1937), edited by Margaret Mead, that "in spite of the formal phrasings of cooperation, nonaggressiveness, and affability, the Zuili are in the opinion of a number of field workers a rather 'mean people,'" holding grudges and sharp personal animosities "that under the influence of white contact seem to have flowered into full-blown factionalism," especially between Catholics and Protestants, pro-whites and anti-whites. The Zuili, he wrote, cooperated in all formal and ceremonial situations and did not use violence, except in the few cases of women's quarrels noted by Benedict. But they had "no love for their fellowmen" and were ready "to defame anyone on the least pretext." In short, he wrote, there was discord between the ideals which the Zufli had laid out for themselves and the way they put those ideals into practice. "Beneath the surface of a cultural norm of benignity and of affability there appears to lie some restless irritability," he wrote. "It is difficult to account for it."

The pro-Patterns group in anthropology explained the Zufli paradox by deciding that Benedict's depiction was that of the ideal pattern of Zuifi life, often violated in actual practice, but setting goals, attitudes, and directions for Zuili culture to follow. The study of ideal versus real patterns became an important one in anthropology. Clyde Kluckhohn, a pro-Patternist, called Benedict's picture of Zuili that of her old informants of the pueblo, who told her of the ideal rather than the reality. Kluckhohn elaborated on ideal versus reality in "Patterning as Exemplified in Navaho Culture" (1941), in which he defined "ideal patterns" as those that show what people do and say when they completely conform to cultural standards: in other words, the "musts" and "shoulds" of a culture. Other patterns, "behavior patterns," came from observation of how people actually behaved. Usually, he wrote, there was a difference between the ideal and the behavior patterns. He also suggested five categories of ideal patterns: the compulsory, in which a culture allowed only one way to meet a situation; the preferred, in which out of several possible ways, one was most acceptable; the typical, in which out of several proper ways of behaving one was most usual; the alternative pattern, in which several behaviors were equally acceptable; and the restricted, in which behavior was acceptable only for some members or groups of society, not society as a whole. He proposed that "pattern" be used to talk about overt culture and "configuration" to talk about covert culture in an attempt to clarify terms. In "Covert Culture and Administrative Problems" (1943), Kluckhohn elaborated on the ideas of "covert" and "overt" culture, which he attributed to Ralph Linton, another way of approaching ideal versus reality. Earlier C. S. Ford, in "Society, Culture, and the Human Organism" (1939), defined culture as a set of rules and beliefs that touched on but were not necessarily the same as actual behavior. George Peter Murdock, in "The Cross-Cultural Survey" (1941), also distinguished between ideal patterns and the behavior of people in a society. He considered real behavior irrelevant to a study of culture. Thus Benedict's work led cultural anthropologists to wrestle with the ideas of real behavior and ideal behavior, and the weight to assign to each.

A second direction that opened to the pro-Patternists was the idea of multi-characterization of culture. Benedict had concentrated on cultures with one dominant integration and had agreed in Patterns that most cultures did not have this degree of integration. In a search for ways to deal with more loosely integrated cultures, several anthropologists turned to a multi-causal framework. Morris Opler developed the idea of "themes" in cultures, the presence of several dominant elements interweaving within a culture, both reinforcing and blocking each other in varying degrees. John Gillin formulated the idea of "objectives" as cultural integrators in "Cultural Adjustment" (1944), each objective in turn made up of smaller components such as "trends" or "orientations" within the culture. Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton, in The Navaho (1946), used the idea of nine "basic convictions" or "premises" underlying Navaho life. The premises essentially set out a standard of behavior, explained how it worked in related situations, and included alternatives for satisfying the standard.

But the approach that attracted the most attention and gave the movement its name was the study of personality in and of culture. This ranged from James Woodard's rather crude but interesting attempt to explain cultural structure directly in terms of personality structure based on Benedict's idea of culture as "personality writ large," to psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner's very sophisticated formulation of "basic personality structure" in each culture, a concept his anthropological colleague Cora Du Bois later modified to "modal personality." Margaret Mead, writing in 1935 in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, said her work took Benedict's "approved" personalities one step farther, making hers a study of "approved personalities of each sex." Anthropologists and psychologists together explored culture and personality, searching for "ideal" personalities or later "typical" personalities within cultures, those who conformed more or less to the ideals and standards of their cultures. Benedict had described the "ideal man" of Zuffi, the Plains, Kwakiutl, and Dobu cultures. Following studies attempted to put her ideas on a more scientific foundation.

The conflict point within the profession came at the Zuni paradox. While both the enthusiastic and the unenthusiastic could accept the idea of real and ideal patterns and of configurations, the latter group balked at Benedict's Apollonian-Dionysian contrast. Many anthropologists had not been comfortable with it from its inception in "Psychological Types." The idea itself was a literary one, deliberately so on Benedict's part in an attempt to neutralize the terminology. As she wrote to Mead about Boas' response to psychoanalytic ideas, "I think Boas would accept all of it but the terminology—but that kills it." However, the idea backfired. To many the Apollonian-Dionysian contrast marked the epitome of the nonscientific method which they were determined to minimize in their discipline. Kroeber made their fears vivid in his article "History and Science in Anthropology" (1935) and subsequent articles on the same theme. The article suggested that anthropology was no longer a "historical science," and that the discipline now faced a choice between an identity as "scientific" or "historical" anthropology. By "historical" he did not mean especially concerned with time, but with "a basic and integrative intellectual attitude" imported from history, just as objective analysis had been imported from science. Kroeber's use of the word historical was misleading because what he wanted to convey was the idea of an integrated holistic approach rather than scientific analysis into parts. He identified the work of Benedict and Mead, and to a lesser extent Fortune and Bunzel, as deriving from this historical side of anthropology. Critical of the "painstaking analysis and non-selective objectivity of the 'scientific' approach," this group, as did researchers in history, selected elements needed to build up a picture, omitted those not needed, or "slurred" them "with intentional subjectivity." This subjectivity caused a conflict with the "scientific" group, but Kroeber wrote that this was "no longer a defect as soon as its [their work's] essentially historical nature" was accepted.

Kroeber saw the subjective quality of Benedict's and her colleagues' work not as a flaw, but as an acceptable result of a different quality of interpretation, As he had explained in his review of Patterns of Culture, the approach, that of finding the "genius" of a culture, could not be "measured or demonstrated." It lay outside the present narrow boundaries of science, which did not admit the validity of a "subjective empirical approach." Estimating the relative importance of a pattern in a culture had to be done "primarily by feeling," and validity depended on "the fit of the pattern parts" and on not leaving a significant part of the culture out of the picture. "Those who will," he wrote, "may quarrel with the approach as 'unscientific.'" But then they also had to quarrel with historian Jacob Burckhardt's Renaissance, Lord Bryce's American Commonwealth, or anthropologist Robert Redfield's Tepoztlan, all acknowledged and respected, though nonscientific, works of cultural insight, conveying essential truths about their subjects in "historical" style. Kroeber supported Benedict. He found her ideas "original, suggestive, and stimulating." Unfortunately, he wrote, the 1930's decade was a time "which rates science high and history low."

Anthropology was not the only social science experiencing this crisis of approach. In psychology in 1938 wellrespected Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray wrote of two movements in psychology, which he labeled the "peripheralists" and the "centralists," terms that more accurately describe what was also going on in anthropology than Kroeber's split into "history" and "science." The peripheralists equated to those in Kroeber's science category. They were objectivists, desiring to concentrate on the observable and measurable facts, the external data. When they did speculate they used limited conceptual schemes found useful in analyzing parts, not wholes. The culture area in anthropology was that type of scheme. The psychological objectivists saw the concept of personality as their counterparts in anthropology saw culture, as only the "sum total or product of interacting elements rather than a unity," something to analyze into parts.

The centralists, whom Kroeber would have identified under the term history, and with whom Ruth Benedict stood, were "attracted to subjective facts" and chiefly concerned with the "governing processes" of the brain (or culture). They found these processes by "listening to the form and content" of the personality (of culture). They used subjective terminology. They were "conceptualists," trying to observe behavior accurately but merging interpretation with perception, referring overt actions to underlying impulses which they conceptualized as there. They were "totalists," seeing the personality (or culture) as a "complex unity, of which each function is merely a partially distinguished integral." They were open to the use of empathic intuition; as "dynamicists" they ascribed action to inner forces rather than external ones. The centralists, unlike the peripheralists, felt "no compulsion to count and measure." Murray defended the need for centralists in psychology as Kroeber defended the need for "historians" in anthropology. In its present stage, Murray said, the study of persons needed people with broad views, who perceived "the interplay of general forces." Psychology in its then fluid state needed people with intuition, for "In the wake of intuition comes investigation directed at crucial problems rather than mere unenlightened fact collecting." Murray's analysis did not threaten his colleagues. But when Kroeber argued for a similar recognition in anthropology his terms were too full of negative connotations for anthropologists to accept.

Boas' response was to deny that such a dichotomy existed. Benedict and others who agreed with her approach, such as Kroeber, saw themselves as scientists, but of necessity forging a new definition and philosophy of science, a more realistic, flexible tool than the rigid ideal of "true" science borrowed erroneously from the physical sciences. Kroeber himself spent the 1930's trying to derive such a philosophy of science. But Kroeber had raised the spectre for other more sensitive readers that anthropology would no longer be accounted scientific in an intellectual milieu where, as Kroeber put it in a later paper, science had become "the god of innumerable laymen" with a "totalitarian realm" claimed for it, where even anthropologists made a "fetish" of science.

Moreover, the values of history were values that anthropologists had learned to discard, to avoid, to view as shoddy work. The "historical approach" was "subjective," the catch-all word in anthropology for worthless work. It depended on the view of the observer rather than the reality of the event or object observed. The historian received recognition for his or her ability at perceiving relations and building "convincing bridges" across gaps in knowledge. The historian was honored most especially for skill in interpretation: for reading between the lines, selecting elements to highlight, omitting or downplaying elements deemed unimportant, giving elements perspective—all scientifically damning practices. Historians did not "prove," as scientists tried to. They "inferred" more likely or less likely "probabilities of fact, of relation, of significance." The historian weighed possibilities, then selected and combined them into the most coherent whole or pattern. This was the method of conceptual integration, wrote Kroeber. If anthropologists were to follow Ruth Benedict's lead, this is how they would end up as a discipline. For many anthropologists this nonscientific projection was hard to stomach.

Benedict had first used the Apollonian/Dionysian comparison in 1928. In the nine years between 1928 and the publication of two major articles on the subject in 1937, the only one to attack it was Paul Radin, and his was an isolated case. Radin was of the first generation of Boas' students. Like the others his family had emigrated to America from Europe. He was an expert on the Winnebago and knew other American Indian tribes as well. But he had a love-hate relationship with academic life and for many years went from one temporary position to another. In 1926 he spent the winter in New York. He gave an informal class to Columbia graduate students and Benedict got to know him. Her diary from that year contains several references to him. She enjoyed him, but their views were not compatible. "Lunch with Radin—," she wrote, "much anthropological divergence." Radin was a Jungian, but paradoxically he believed in the basic historicity of mythology. Like Parsons and Kroeber but to a greater extreme, he saw historical reconstruction, or the piecing together of the historical backgrounds of cultures, as the major way of understanding cultural processes in the present. In quick succession he wrote two books—Social Anthropology (1932), which defended historical reconstruction, and The Method and Theory of Ethnology: An Essay in Criticism (1933), in which he severely criticized Boasian anthropologists for moving away from it. Benedict's ideas presented an approach to culture that threatened to replace historical reconstruction, which was already under attack, as the chief approach of the discipline. In The Method and Theory of Ethnology Radin wrote critically of her "Configurations" article. He talked of her "revolt" against the quantitative method, writing that "her whole temperament is that of a culture historian" even though she protested against historical reconstructions as "naive and simpliste." He accused her of "dogmatically" including and excluding things "in an unjustifiable and arbitrary manner," and added that since "unpalatable facts" might disturb the "desired harmony," Benedict "not only flies in the face of these facts; she calmly leaves them out." Apart from this, Radin thought it doubtful that "distilled syntheses" like Benedict's were ever really applicable to culture. They were fascinating but of extremely problematical value. They might hold for individuals but not for a specific culture or a culture area. Radin's attack on Benedict was minor compared to that on Boas and others in American anthropology. Kroeber wrote to Boas that Radin made him and Wissler feel like "the two thieves crucified by the side of the True Cross." It was generally recognized at the time that Radin was upholding his own rather extreme point of view in his books.

But after 1935 and the writing of Kroeber's "History and Science" article, the Apollonian-Dionysian configurations of Zuifi and the Plains became a primary focus of anthropological debate. Only Reo Fortune had been to Dobu, and there was no way to either prove or disprove his work. Nobody dared challenge Benedict's Kwakiutl interpretation in the face of Boas' approval. But Zuifi and the Plains lent themselves to an attack. Disproving the ApollonianDionysian contrast became the key symbolic activity for disproving or disparaging the historical approach and reaffirming the primacy of science in anthropology.

It took a few years for a serious attack to get going. The objectivists had the problem that Benedict's account of Zufif was not just based on her own experience there and her own known expertise in Zufli mythology but also upon the best data available at the time. Even Robert Lowie, a natural skeptic of holistic interpretations, remarked that Benedict's account of Zuifi was "so satisfactory" because it rested on "most ample documentation by herself and other observers." Later investigators also seemingly found corroboration for an Apollonian world view in the Pueblos among the Hopi. It was not until 1937 that two articles appeared, one a direct attack, the other more circumspect, yet seen as more damaging to Benedict's position. This latter was "Zuiii: Some Observations and Queries," written by a young Chinese anthropologist, Li An-che. The article was not a critique of Benedict per se. Li An-che wrote the article with the help of both Ruth Benedict and Ruth Bunzel. He intended to make the article a study of how observations about Zuiii by prior observers, even those aware of the problem, had been colored by unconscious and implicit expectations from Western society which he, being Chinese, could see around. He perceived himself as questioning "official view[s], native or otherwise," in favor of the realities of Zuiii culture. He singled out not only Benedict and Bunzel but also Kroeber for specific criticism and criticized the work of "almost all the students of Zuifi culture" and "the universal idea of the students of the area," adding that observers were "easily led astray by their own background." Of those points of Benedict's and Bunzel's he took exception to, their emphasis on the lack of personal elements in Zufli religion, the idea of leadership in Zuiji, and the discipline of children, he stressed that they were "oversimplified" and "misleading" because of a "basic fallacy"—reasoning within "the logical implications of one's own culture." He saw research in Zufli in general as unbalanced due to an unconscious Western point of view.

In Western society, he wrote, prayers as a fixed formula and as a spontaneous outpouring of the heart were antithetical, so Benedict and Bunzel had seen the formulaic religion of the Zufli as impersonal and detached. But he himself had felt an intensity in the formulaic prayers of the Zuili. Concerning leadership, he wrote that at least since white contact there had been struggles for individual leadership within Zuili, stirring up strife between groups. But he also saw Benedict as caught in the Western idea that lack of personal competitiveness implied lack of desire to lead. He saw traditional Zuili ambition as based in religious knowledge, not personal magnetism or ego. He also challenged the idea held by all Zufii researchers and used by Benedict, that ZuMi parents did not discipline children. Here again, he wrote, reiterating his main point, it was not the observation that was at fault but "an interpretation based on an incomplete recognition of the factors involved." His own interpretation suggested that verbal discipline of children came from all adults, not just parents, and that adults instilled mental or religious fears in children to make them behave well, as effective as the fear of a spanking. Besides these points, he also challenged Kroeber's "Western" approach to marriage. Thus it was not facts Li An-che challenged in his article but the interpretation put upon the facts by Benedict and others. He did not call it unjustifiable and arbitrary as Radin had, merely uninformed and restricted by Western perceptions. Li Anche spent one summer season in Zuifi before writing his article. In part he was influenced by his own Chinese perspective. But his article provided the first specific ammunition for the view that the interpretation in Patterns of Culture was flawed.

The direct attack on the Apollonian-Dionysian contrast occurred when Bernard Aginsky, a graduate of the Columbia Anthropology Department now teaching at New York University, presented a paper before the annual joint American Anthropological Association-American FolkLore Society meeting at New Haven, Connecticut, in December 1937, called "Psychopathic Trends in Culture." As Aginsky understood it, Benedict had set up the Apollonian-Dionysian duality to apply to all North America, calling every tribe outside the Pueblos Dionysian. His purpose was to show that the Pomo Indians of California had both Dionysian and Apollonian traits, plus what he called an "Anxiety" pattern, and thus refute the idea that the Pomo were Dionysian, as they would be classified under Benedict's system as he understood it. This paper is the only one to which Benedict replied in print. In her "Reply to Dr. Aginsky," published in the same issue of Character and Personality in which the article afterwards appeared, she stated that Aginsky's idea of her Apollonian-Dionysian contrast as "polarities of behavior … where-by cultures can be understood in toto" was totally wrong, "completely alien to my own theoretical position." She added that she had "constantly opposed any 'typing' of cultures into which any newly studied culture would have to be arbitrarily fitted." To call her Apollonian-Dionysian contrast such a system was an egregious misreading of her book. The system she espoused was an open and not a closed one. She also charged that he had used Apollonian with quite a different meaning than she had, shaping the word to his argument.

Lowie discussed Li An-che's criticisms of Benedict's work in his History of Ethnological Theory (1938). Typical of those troubled by the subjective implications of Benedict's work, he gave "qualified approval" to her configuration approach, agreeing that "cultural leitmotifs" existed and should be studied. But he attacked the Apollonian-Dionysian contrast. He argued that in that contrast Benedict had oversimplified a real antithesis. He compared her to a physicist finding out about electricity by looking it up in a dictionary rather than observing the actual phenomena involved. He thought Li An-che had shown that Benedict's emphases threw the picture "out of focus," rather than making it more precise. He argued that Benedict's use of terms like "trance," "frenzy," and "orgy" without giving them "precise and accepted" meanings largely vitiates Benedict's interesting contrast of non-Pueblo and Pueblo cultures of North America." He argued that socalled Dionysian peoples conformed to that pattern "only to a moderate degree." The Crow, a people he had extensively studied, rarely talked of supernormal phenomena in terms of ecstasy, he wrote. This from the man who in 1922 had written a fictionalized account of a Crow warrior's life that was totally Dionysian. To counteract the idea of the ecstatic vision he cited from an article by Radin, "Ojibwa and Ottawa Puberty Dreams," the nonecstatic, carefully orchestrated case of an Ojibwa boy of seven who after fasting under the eye of his elders acquired "the sort of guardian spirit his instructors permit him to accept." If Lowie had looked he would have discovered that Benedict had talked about this type of vision and where it fit into the Dionysian scheme in Patterns.

Elsie Clews Parsons' Pueblo Indian Religion came out in 1939. It was the most complete study of the Pueblos to date and is still a comprehensive master source of data. Parsons did not agree with the psychological approach to culture and therefore the book was not a resounding affirmation of Patterns of Culture. Although she was against Benedict's subjective approach, her own scientific objectivity led her to confirm Benedict's information on several disputed points: the disinclination to drink; the almost unheard-of-quality of suicide and, in Zufii, the point that it was so foreign to them that it caused laughter; that murder was almost as rare as suicide; that whipping in Pueblo families was infrequent, marginal behavior; whipping as a voluntary public rite of cleansing certain times of the year or in certain ceremonies; the fact of the boys getting to whip the katcinas at the end of their second initiation. At the one whipping rite where Parsons was present, only perfunctory whipping went on and it was a cleansing rite. She confirmed the idea of Zuiji as an orderly society where leaders had to be men of peace, a cooperative society where individuality was frowned upon. She affirmed that the scalp ritual was to cleanse the slayer, not celebrate victory.

But she tried through historical reconstruction to undermine Benedict's position by showing that social aggression had once existed in Zufli. She suggested war, the threat of war, or internal feuds as bases for Pueblo migrations in early history. She also suggested that kiva groups originated as organizations of war brothers, an idea that provoked a sharp response from Benedict in her review that it would "hardly survive marshalled argumentation." Parsons also suggested that Pueblo children, while not punished into conformity, were frightened into it. She saw punishment as a factor in Pueblo whipping of adults, though not a major factor. All in all, Parsons supplied information that both sides could use to uphold or damn the Apollonian idea, but, if anything, the book tended to confirm Benedict's picture of Zufii.

The controversy heated up still more in the 1940's. Laura Thompson and Alice Josephs' book, The Hopi Way (1944), offered major support to the Apollonian idea, as did Thompson's article, "Logico-Aesthetic Integration in Hopi Culture" (1945). But the objectivists intuitively felt that where there was factionalism and personal animosity there must be aggression in the culture. Benedict had stressed the nonviolence of Zufli culture. Evidence of violence, aggression, or even a tendency to excess within the Pueblos would shatter the Apollonian idea once and for all. Dissenting research focused on such issues as discipline of children, lack of suicide, and the use of alcohol in Pueblo culture.

Li An-che had raised the question of how children were socialized in Zuiii. Esther Schiff Goldfrank examined this question in 1945 in "Socialization, Personality and the Structure of Pueblo Society (with Particular Reference to Hopi and Zuifi)," which she considered a major attack on Benedict's position on the disciplining of children and the Apollonian view. Though she agreed with Benedict that parents were very lenient, she disagreed with Benedict's statement that ceremonial whippings were so light they did not raise welts. She gave several graphic examples of severe whippings from Hopi, but her one explicit reference from Zufli revealed that boys were whipped in layers of blankets, taken off one by one after each ceremonial whipping so that only the last touched the skin itself. Where she was most successful in undermining the Apollonian idea was in her point that contrary to Benedict's and Thompson's ideas, Zufl and Hopi children were not gradually fitted into their cultural patterns, but forcibly coerced. She gave a plausible account of fears instilled into children so that they would behave correctly, positing that these fears led to the molding of children into cooperative adults. But even when attacking the Apollonian idea Goldfrank did it within the Culture and Personality approach, accepting Benedict's idea of the Zuiii configurational pattern, questioning only the supposedly Apollonian means by which Zulis achieved cooperation. Anthropologist John W. Bennett, trying to explain the difference between Goldfrank's approach and that of Thompson and Benedict, said that Goldfrank's "critical realism" contrasted sharply with the "impressionistic, evocative" approach of Thompson and Benedict. Goldfrank was more the "literal-minded scientist," while Thompson was more subjective. This work followed an article written by Dorothy Eggan, "The General Problem of Hopi Adjustment" (1943), which argued that Hopi Indians in spite of loving infancies developed into adults exhibiting a high degree of anxiety, not Apollonian calm. Earlier, Sun Chief. The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian (1942) vividly described Sun Chief's brutal whippings during his initiation ceremonies and the fearsomeness of the scare katcinas. However, the book was criticized in 1945 because it was unclear whether Sun Chief was a misfit or representative of Hopi in general and because only one-fifth of the original data had been used and there was no indication as to the effect of the condensing and editing on the final version.

On the issue of alcohol Benedict had written that unlike the situation with other Indians, alcohol was neither an "administrative problem" nor an "inescapable issue" among the Pueblos, that as a culture drunkenness was "repulsive" to them, in line with their Apollonian bent. The results of inquiry about alcohol were mixed. Studies done in the 1940's showed that some Zuilis did drink, especially around the time of a major festival, the Shalako. But it also seemed clear that there were strong social attitudes against drinking and that drunkenness was not the social problem it was for many American Indian tribes. Concerning Benedict's statement that suicide was almost outside the Pueblo world view, a totally foreign idea, a statement backed up by both Ruth Bunzel and Elsie Clews Parsons, the two anthropologists who had spent the most time in the Pueblos and knew the people best, former Columbia graduate student E. Adamson Hoebel used the principle of the negative instance against her, discovering three cases of suicide committed in Zufli after 1939 by which he tried to cast doubt on Benedict's information. Hoebel was one of the most active in the 1940's in discounting the Apollonian-Dionysian idea. In The Cheyenne Way (1941) he showed that the supposedly Dionysian Cheyenne had what he considered many Apollonian features, such as the restrained behavior expected of chiefs and the low amount of aggressive behavior between members of the tribe. In Man in the Primitive World, (1949), he argued that the Western Pueblos, Hopi and Zuili, differed from the Central and Eastern Pueblos; that all could not be considered Apollonian.

The war against the Apollonian-Dionysian contrast went on long after Benedict's death. In a 1954 article Hoebel cited the criticisms by Eggan (1943), Goldfrank (1945), Li An-che (1937), and Bennett (1946), saying exaggeratedly that they "only begin to indicate the extent of the artistic and poetic idealization of Pueblo culture that Benedict presented." He was forced to add however that it was a paradox that with her "highly questionable techniques of observation" she contributed "theory and methodological devices of such great import and lasting value." Even Kluckhohn by the mid-1950's agreed that Benedict's work had to be "qualified in many respects and modified or reexpressed in others if justice is to be done to the variety of behavioral fact" and the Zufii ideal pattern. Victor Barnouw in 1963 cited "a tendency to overstatement and to ignore inconvenient inconsistent data." By the late 1950's anthropology had successfully relegated the Apollonian-Dionysian idea to the dust heap. In his revised edition of Man in the Primitive World (1958), Hoebel deleted the material about the suicides and that about the differences between the Western and Eastern pueblos. He also succinctly summed up the general anthropological position by then about Patterns of Culture. He called it the "classic formulation of the idea of cultural configuration in relation to ideal personality types." He called it "persuasively written in fine literary style," but added, "it should not be taken as a reliable ethnography of the cultures discussed, although its major theme is acceptable."

It seems clear in retrospect that people saw in Benedict's work what they need to fortify their own version of anthropological reality—and also that the Apollonian-Dionysian contrast became a symbol of the underlying value struggle between what was perceived as science versus non-science as the framework of the discipline, with "true" science eventually winning out. Those who opposed the contrast most vehemently were those who believed in the necessity of anthropology being identified as a science in the traditional sense. Each side brought a different set of facts and interpretations to the argument, and on both sides the facts were true; only the viewpoint of the observer differed, and the observers divided at the boundary between a rigid definition of "science" and a flexible definition of science that was interpreted as "non-science." The evidence itself was ambiguous and could be read both ways. If the issue had just been that of the character of the Zuiii people, as it ostensibly seemed, the arguments against Benedict's work should have totally discredited it as a shoddy piece of field work and it should have been forgotten. But again and again in the following decades anthropologists discredited Benedict's cultural description but ended by accepting the premises on which that description was built.

According to their varying lights, both sides were "right." Accepting the values reinforced by the scientific side meant admitting that Benedict's work was subjective, literary, overstated, and oversimplified, and thus scientifically damned. From the history-minded side these same qualities became positive values and Benedict's work reinterpreted as integrative, clear writing that established a deeper level of insight into cultures than had been achieved before. This value difference probably accounts for the bafflement and ambiguity of response in the writing of some anthropologists in the 1950's and 1960's, who, after criticizing the description of Zufli in Patterns as useless, still could not discard Benedict's insight into the heart of Zufii life.

It seems clear that Ruth Benedict did not deliberately leave out information in an arbitrary and unjustified manner. She worked with the best available data of her time, relying on the field work of Ruth Bunzel, who had learned the Zuiii language and spent several years returning to Zunii to study the culture. This information she supplemented with the work of Elsie Clews Parsons and others, bolstered by her own experience at Zuiji. "Benedict's description of Zuifi has found favor with the best judges," wrote Lowie in 1938. She built her theory on data, not airy speculation. That she selected and highlighted certain information is clear, but only in the humanistic tradition that allowed and encouraged such highlighting if it led to a clearer truth. Those who attacked her were excessive in upholding the rigid "scientific" tradition. She did downplay the tension and factionalism in Zuili life. She did not omit them. She wrote of culturally sanctioned violence by women, where wives blackened the eyes of rivals and sisters broke furniture or took something from the other's house after quarreling. She spoke of critical village gossip as commonplace; of the war priests, war societies, and scalp ceremonies; of whipping as a common act in Zuili, although as a "blessing and a cure," not as self-torture or torture. She wrote of witchcraft as an "anxiety complex" among the Zufii, of people suspecting one another. She gave the example of one famous case of a man among the Zufii whom she knew who got drunk, boasted he could not be killed (the sign of a witch), and was tortured by being hung up from the rafters by his thumbs for witchcraft, with the result that his shoulders were crippled for life.

She did not try to hide or repress information potentially damaging to her view of Zuiji. Writing to political scientist Harold Lasswell in 1935, she said that judging from her experience in Zuifi there was something "deep-seated in pueblo ethos" that allowed stresses to build up until they released disastrously. "Zuiji is intact," she wrote, "but its history could always be written in terms of factionalisms," and splits in Hopi were "just the logical extension of the usual pueblo situation." Again she wrote in Zdi Mythology (1935), "Grudges are cherished in Zuifi. They are usually the rather generalized expression of slights and resentments in a small community." When graduate student Irving Goldman wrote about the Zuifi in Cooperation and Competition (1937), he did so after a number of conversations and discussions with Benedict and Ruth Bunzel. He made a number of revisions in the text at their suggestion. What he wrote about the Zufil therefore had their stamp of approval. What he wrote suggests that Benedict and Bunzel were then working on answers to the problem of Zuili factionalism. The paper suggests that Benedict first saw factionalism as a result of white contact and not integral to the Zuili configuration. Moreover, she was dealing in Patterns with the "normal" person of Zuili society, the approved person the society encouraged everyone to be. Gossip and bickering were not a part of the approved way to live although they were prevalent in reality. They existed outside of the Zufii ideal.

We perceive this now as a limited idea, but then the configuration approach was a pioneering concept that Benedict felt it necessary to make clear above all else. Like all new ideas it took time for it to unfold in all its ramifications. There were some things Benedict just could not see at the beginning that later became clearer. By 1935 she had begun to see the gossip and factionalism as part of the configuration. By then she was working on the difference between sin and shame and how they act in a society. Goldman's paper suggests she saw a connection between the gossip and defamation in Zufli and the culture's chief social sanction of shame, which made both public criticism and sensitivity to such criticism necessary. By 1935 she had also begun to see certain facets of Zuifi life as counterbalances and safety valves that helped preserve the amiability of Zuili social life. Her book Zad! Mythology pointed to mythology as an outlet for vicarious violence and wish fulfillment not allowed by actual Zuifi life that served to defuse actual violence in the society. She wrote to Elsie Clews Parsons in 1937, "Zufli daily life is full of cherished grudges but no violence; the mythology allows the violent expression of them."

Aside from her reply to Bernard Aginsky's article, Benedict stayed out of the controversy surrounding her work. In a 1936 letter she wrote, "I haven't any claims to describing a culture in one word." Where there was a word available "to point up a discussion," such as Apollonian or Dionysian, she used it. "But," she wrote, "I don't attach any more meaning to it than a historian does to 'feudal' when he has to use that." In her effort "not to be technical" and her "dislike for the passive voice," she wrote, "I often omitted much that seemed to be obvious." If she had realized how her intentions would be misunderstood, she would have "left the clumsy sentences in." In a 1941 letter she called the Apollonian-Dionysian contrast between Plains and Pueblo "as important as the feudal nonfeudal contrast is between Europe in the 13th Century and such a trade center as Florence." But the categories were neither universal nor necessarily transferable to other cultures or other times.

She gave her answer to the profession in her outgoing speech as President of the AAA in 1947, and that answer was a vision of an anthropology in which science and "history" did not fight each other, but melded together to create a more complete, complex picture of the life of humankind. She affirmed anthropology as a science but added that anthropology "handicaps itself in method and insight by neglecting the work of the great humanists." The humanist tradition had much to offer discriminating anthropologists, she stated, because humanists had a head start in studying "emotion, ethics, rational insight and purpose," which had become the subjects which with modern anthropologists were wrestling. They could "analyze cultural attitudes and behavior more cogently," she wrote, if they knew George Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets, Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, or Shakespearian criticism. In Three Philosophical Poets Santayana studied the contrasting cultures of Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe as characterized by the "cosmic parables" they wove in their work. From both Santayana and Shakespearian criticism, Benedict wrote, she learned "habits of mind which at length made me an anthropologist." She learned from the criticism written in different eras how human thoughts were culturally conditioned. She learned from the standards of good criticism to take into account "whatever is said and done," discarding nothing relevant, to try to "understand the interrelations of discrete bits," to surrender oneself to the data and use all the insights one was capable of. Criticism, she wrote, taught the importance of contextual knowledge of facts, and studies of imagery taught techniques for studying "symbolisms and free associations which fall into patterns and show processes congenial to the human mind in different cultures." The humanities alone, however, provided only partial answers to human questions, as did the sciences alone. "Any commitment to methods which exclude either approach is self-defeating." The anthropologist should not be afraid to belabor the obvious or to be "subjective." For, she concluded, "The anthropologist can use both approaches."