SOURCE: "Patterns of Culture: 1922-1934," in An Anthropologist at Work. Writings of Ruth Benedict, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959, pp. 201-12.

[Mead was a leading figure in American anthropology whose works, including Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), emphasized a vital relevance between "primitive" and modern societies which she believed could illuminate contemporary social problems. In the following excerpt, she studies Benedict's defining methods and principles as an anthropologist.]

Ruth Benedict stood midway between the older type of anthropology, in which theoreticians—men like Tylor or Frazer, Lang or Crawley—worked with materials gathered by others—with old documents, travelers' and missionaries' accounts, or with notes laboriously written down by native converts—and the kind of anthropology related to living cultures, which grew out of field work in the South Seas and in Africa. Because she wanted vivid materials, she valued old eyewitness accounts of American Indians, such as those found in the Jesuit Relations; because she wanted materials meticulously collected by the rigorous textual methods which Boas insisted upon, she herself was willing to spend long, grueling hours of work among Indians whose cultures, through the erosion of contact with cultures brought from Europe centuries before, had hardened in resistance or were disintegrating before her eyes.

She never had an opportunity to participate in a living culture where she could speak the language and get to know people well as individuals. In her work with North American Indians, she always had to work through interpreters and to seek out the particularly knowledgeable individual who was also amenable to the task of sitting and dictating while, with flying pencil and aching arm, she wrote down verbatim hundreds of pages of translated tales to be redictated when she returned to New York. The materials which she herself collected differed from the fragments which other students of North American Indians had collected in that she had seen the Indians who told the stories, had watched people whom she did not know go through a few ceremonies, and had learned to trust her knowledge of the shape and feel of a culture of which she was recording only a very small part.

Even when she was sitting in a pueblo day after day, she was always, because of the very nature of the problem, straining to see and hear a more coherent culture back of the broken phrases of the day. This made her field work more like reading the work of others and made it particularly easy for her to work over the field materials of her students. Back of their inadequate notes—as also back of her own partial ones and back of the partial insights of a Jesuit missionary, or a Grinnell camping with the Cheyenne, or a Sahagun recording the crumbling glory of the Aztecs—there was a whole, if one could but perceive it. She had begun her work by following separate themes and small items wherever they occurred, and in the conclusion to her study of the Guardian Spirit, she wrote:

There is then no observed correlation between the vision-guardian-spirit concept, and the other traits with which it is associated, as it were organically, over the continent, and we have found no coalescence which we may regard as being other than fortuitous—an historical happening of definite time and place. The miscellaneous traits that enter in different centers into its make-up are none of them either the inevitable forerunner, the inevitable accompaniment of the concept, but have each an individual existence and a wider distribution outside this complex. In one region it has associated itself with puberty ceremonials, in another with totemism, in a third with secret societies, in a fourth with inherited rank, in a fifth with black magic. Among the Blackfoot, it is their economic system into which the medicine bundles have so insinuated themselves that the whole manner of it is unintelligible without taking into account the monetary value of the vision. Among the Kwakiutl, their social life and organization, their caste system, their concept of wealth, would be equally impossible of comprehension without a knowledge of those groups of individuals sharing the same guardian spirit by supernatural revelation. It is in every case a matter of social patterning—of that which cultural recognition has singled out and standardized.

It is, so far as we can see, an ultimate fact of human nature that man builds up his culture out of disparate elements, combining and recombining them; and until we have abandoned the superstition that the result is an organism functionally interrelated, we shall be unable to see our cultural life objectively, or to control its manifestations.

This statement Radcliffe-Brown took as representing her ultimate position, namely, that she believed that cultures were made up of "rags and tatters." But she herself was working steadily to find some integrating principle that would explain both the disparate origins of the elements of which a culture was built and the wholeness which she felt was there in each culture.

When one works with a living culture this wholeness is part of one's everyday experience. The people among whom one is living speak, walk, talk, sleep, pray, and die within a recognizable and related pattern. The infant one holds in one's arms shows by prefigurative tension in his muscles just how he expects to be carried, and there is an echo of his particular urgency in the pleading gestures of the sick and in the trembling touch of the dying. Living among a people whose skin color is gleaming copper, soft brown, or shining black, whose hair is straight and coarse as a horse's mane, or falls in waves, or curls so tight that it can be combed straight up in the air, it is very difficult both to attend to the ways a people embody the language they speak and the patterns they are living out and to remember that this language, which seems to be so appropriate to these lips, and these feelings may also occur half the world away—where all the externals are different—with as seeming entire appropriateness as one finds here. Watching a tall Sepik native, lime stick tasseled with records of the human heads he has taken, pounding the ground with the heavy end of a fallen palm leaf to scare away the ghosts, it is difficult to see this act, so perfectly integrated into a local ceremony, as "an element," unless one has also stood in a Balinese village and has seen the same pounding, in a setting so different, among a slender, exotic, peaceful, and ritualistic people of another race and with a quite different culture.

Many field workers who in the early twentieth century wrote the first monographs based on the study of living cultures were victims of this illusion of "fit." If they knew enough anthropology to realize that human cultures are human inventions, that they are learned anew by each generation, and that one people can borrow from another, not borrowing all but only a bit—a way of making a pot or of killing an enemy by magic, a form of courtship, or a method of cremating the dead—then the need to account for the coherence, the wholeness, of a culture became even more urgent.

Anthropologists dealt with this problem in different ways. Rivers, after making a vivid study of a single people, the Todas, accepted a totally historical viewpoint and ended his days treating discrete items of behavior as the residues of an earlier integration. Radcliffe-Brown, after having had an opportunity to work on one of the most isolated and integrated cultures in the world, that of the pygmies of the Andaman Islands, discounted all his experience of them as a living people—which would nevertheless sometimes peep out in conversation as he would describe how they peeped out, bright-eyed, from their tiny houses—and treated cultures, which afterward he never studied as wholes, as examples for the establishment of universally valid principles. Malinowski, repelled by his first field trip among the Mailu and captivated by the Trobrianders, pushed away all historical and areal considerations to concentrate on the way "elements" of culture were only meaningful within a functioning context. A generation later, Claude Levi-Strauss, who was for a time entranced by the vivid detail of a living people, also turned to a search for universal principles which run like wires through the material, freezing people eternally into tableaux vivants. And those anthropologists who were less firmly grounded took refuge in theories of race or constitution to explain the patterned and consistent differences among peoples of different cultures.

But Ruth Benedict, piecing together bits from the old, sometimes vigorous, sometimes dull descriptions of Indians as long dead as the buffalo they once had hunted, or turning from the recitation of tales which had lost their functioning relevance in the Pueblo of Cochiti, faced no such problem. She never saw a whole primitive culture that was untroubled by boarding schools for the children, by missions and public health nurses, by Indian Service agents, traders, and sentimental or exiled white people. No living flesh-and-blood member of a coherent culture was present to obscure her vision or to make it too concrete, when, in the summer of 1927, she saw with a sense of revelation that it would be possible to explain the differences among the tribes of the Southwest or the Plains—both in what they had taken from one another and in what they had resisted—as one might explain the choices of an individual who, true to his own temperament, organized his life out of the myriad and often conflicting choices presented to him by a rich historical tradition. She had always been interested in Nietzsche, and his contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian seemed ready-made to her hand to describe the contrast between the Pima and the Zufii. From Pima, she wrote to Boas in 1927, "These people have more in common with the Serrano than with the Pueblos. The contrast with the latter is unbelievable."

During the following winter, in 1927-1928, I was writing Social Organization of Manu'a, happy in the freedom to write more technically, after my attempt to make the material on Samoan adolescence intelligible to educators in Coming of Age in Samoa. We spent hours discussing how a given temperamental approach to living could come so to dominate a culture that all who were born in it would become the willing or unwilling heirs to that view of the world. From the first Ruth Benedict resisted any idea of schematization in terms of a given number of temperaments—Jung's fourfold scheme, for instance. She saw the relationship between a culture, which was "personality writ large" and "time binding," and any individual, who might or might not fit in, as a way of so phrasing all deviation that the unfortunate could be pitied and the world seen as the loser because of gifts which could not be used. She wanted to leave the future open. No attempt to understand human cultures as limited by a given number of temperaments, and so with limited temperamental contrasts, ever pleased her.

Into discussions there came echoes of Koffka's The Growth of the Mind, which I had read and lent to Sapir in 1925, and of conversations between Sapir and Goldenweiser at the Toronto meetings in 1924, when Sapir had been stimulated by Jung and also by Seligman's recent article, "Anthropology and Psychology: A Study of Some Points of Contact," in which he discussed the possibility that certain recognizable pathologies, associated with Jung's types, were given more scope in one culture than in another.

Also into our discussions came my field plans for the next year's work in the Admiralty Islands, where I wanted to test whether one would find among primitive children the kind of thinking that Freud had identified as characteristic of children, neurotics, and primitives, and that Piaget, taking a clue from Levy-Bruhl's discussion of prelogicality, had also identified as primitive. These latter considerations I had hammered out in discussion with Reo Fortune who, before he had begun work in anthropology, had worked on Freud's and Rivers' theories of dreams. Working with Ruth Benedict, I supplied the psychological materials and the concrete experience of participation in a living culture and the way children experienced it, and she tested and retested her emerging theory against her knowledge of the Indians of the Southwest and of the literature on American Indian religion.

Historically, the first written application of her conceptualization was in my chapter on "Dominant Cultural Attitudes," in Social Organization of Manu'a, written in the winter of 1927-1928, before she wrote her own first formulation in "Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest." …

The whole position is quite clear. I wrote:

By this emphasis upon conformity to the all important social structure, I do not mean here the attempt of a society to make all those within it conform to all its ways of thought and behavior. The phenomenon of social pressure and its absolute determination in shaping the individuals within its bounds has been remarked too often to need laboring here. I mean to stress rather the particular implication in the lives of individuals of a particular kind of social pattern. As the Winnebago culture forced its children to blacken their faces and fast for a blessing, goaded them into a search for special experience often beyond any natural inclination in the individual child, so the Samoan emphasis upon social blessedness within an elaborate, impersonal structure influences every aspect of the Samoans' lives.

The chapter on "The Girl in Conflict" in Coming of Age in Samoa had been written in the autumn of 1926, and was already an organized part of our discussions before Ruth Benedict's summer with the Pima in 1927. That chapter began with a question which Ruth Benedict had taught me to ask:

Were there no conflicts, no temperaments which deviated so markedly from the normal that clash was inevitable? Was the diffused affection and the diffused authority of the large families, the ease of moving from one family to another, the knowledge of sex and the freedom to experiment a sufficient guarantee to all Samoan girls of a perfect adjustment?

In the chapter, I discussed the cases of those deviants of whom this was not true.

Coming of Age in Samoa was published in the summer of 1928, close to the time of the Congress at which Ruth Benedict read her paper on "Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest." Social Organization of Manu'a was not published until 1930. The extent to which my work had been shaped by her preoccupations and both of us had been shaped by Sapir's interests was so little remarked then or later that Ernst Kris could say to me, in 1946, that he thought Ruth Benedict's work showed signs of coming around to my point of view! David Mandelbaum's Introduction to the Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality contains only one reference to Ruth Benedict: "Ruth Benedict has written [in her obituary of Sapir] that the position in Chicago was one he was uniquely qualified to adorn." In the posthumous volume in his honor, Language, Culture and Personality, Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir, three of the people who had profited most from his speculations about personality and culture—Ruth Benedict, John Dollard, and I—are not among the contributors.

Instead, posterity has been treated to reconstructions which give misleading impressions. So, for instance, Victor Barnauw, who had been her student, reconstructed in a long obituary article, which is frequently percipient but in which he ignored both written and living sources of information, the origins of the idea of Patterns of Culture.

Willingly Anne Singleton slipped on the rough hair shirt of discipline, took upon herself the exacting Boas regimen of hard work, read endlessly, endured the discomforts of ethnological field work, and finally emerged as "Dr. Benedict." But it is a measure of her individuality that Ruth Benedict never became a mere rubber stamp of the old man's thinking. In fact, her work represents a marked contrast to his. Boas had long ago rejected the "deep" intuitive plunges of German scholarship and philosophy; but in these same dubious sources Ruth Benedict now found inspiration. Under her master's somewhat jaundiced eye she turned to Nietzsche, Spengler and Dilthey, whose ideas she somehow blended with the Boas tradition of intensive field work in a particular area. From this unexpected amalgam she managed to fashion her famous Patterns of Culture.

And there is Melville Herskovits' comment in his book on Boas:

Broader uses of psychological concepts, such as those which attempted to assign entire societies to particular categories of mental set, as in the book Patterns of Culture by his student and colleague Ruth Benedict, seemed to him to raise methodological questions that had not been faced. Though for personal reasons he consented to write a brief preface for the work, he devoted several paragraphs to a critical discussion of the problem in his chapter on methods of research in the textbook he edited, especially pointed because he takes as his example the Northwest Coast Indians, who had been cited as an extreme case by Benedict. Indicating that "the leading motive of their life is the limitless pursuit of gaining social prestige and of holding on to what has been gained, and the intense feeling of inferiority and shame if even a part of the prestige is lost," he adds, "these tendencies are so striking that the amiable qualities that appear in intimate family life are easily overlooked."

The actual facts are that the theoretical part of the work—the usefulness of viewing the integration of a culture within an area in the light of the way individuals with specific temperaments integrated items from within their cultural heritage—was worked out with reference neither to Spengler nor to Dilthey. Nietzsche had been an old favorite of hers. Boas had approved the early manifestations of the theory. When he read Coming of Age in Samoa, which was written under his direct supervision, he made only one objection: "You haven't made clear the distinction between romantic and passionate love." He read Ruth Benedict's paper, "Configurations of Culture in North America," written in 1932, and discussed it with her on the trip which they took to the Southwest together, and she went over with him every detail of the Kwakiutl material in hour-long discussions, which she explicitly acknowledges:

For the Northwest Coast of America I have used not only Professor Franz Boas' text publications and detailed compilations of Kwakiutl life, but his still unpublished material and his penetrating comment upon his experience on the Northwest Coast extending over forty years.

And in the Introduction Boas writes:

As the author points out, not every culture is characterized by a dominant character, but it seems probable that the more intimate our knowledge of the cultural drives that actuate the behavior of the individual, the more we shall find that certain controls of emotion, certain ideals of conduct, prevail that account for what seem to us as abnormal attitudes when viewed from the standpoint of our civilization. The relativity of what is considered social or asocial, normal or abnormal, is seen in a new light.

As for Dilthey, far from battling for her individuality against Boas' disapproval of Dilthey, it was Boas who insisted that she must discuss him, not out of sympathy for Dilthey's ideas but out of the special standards of scholarship which required mention of those who had used comparable ideas irrespective of whether or not one's own ideas derived from them.

From the fresh excitement of the 1927 summer in Pima, when she saw the basic contrast between the Pueblos and the other Indian cultures of North America "as the contrast that is named and described by Nietzsche in his studies of Greek tragedy," was a six year road, in the course of which she published two articles on the subject, both of which dealt with American Indian material. Only in 1932 did she decide that in the book it would be necessary to add a third culture—one which had been studied by a field worker whom she knew well and on which she could trust the material—to set beside Zufii, where she had her own field work as a guide and a corrective, and the Kwakiutl, where she could test each smallest interpretation against Boas' detailed memory. She chose Dobu. The history of her interest in Dobu and of her choice of this culture is contained in a series of letters exchanged with Reo Fortune.

But between what seemed so obvious to me, writing in 1927—namely, that a culture shapes the lives of those who live within it—and the views of the literate world of 1934, when Patterns of Culture was published, there was a great gap. Her publishers in their choice of publicity materials stressed not what she regarded as its major contribution but rather what we had come to think of as obvious. Through a long and spirited correspondence with Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, beginning with a request for a blurb, my writing of the blurb and her revision of it, and the publisher's choices from it, to her rebellious rewriting of the circular for the general reader, she fought for a clear statement of what she felt she had contributed that was new by writing this book. In the copy which she herself prepared for the publisher, she wrote: "In a straightforward style, the author demonstrates how the manners and morals of these tribes, and our own as well, are not piecemeal items of behavior, but consistent ways of life. They are not racial, nor the necessary consequence of human nature, but have grown up historically in the life history of the community."