SOURCE: "Ruth Benedict and the Modernist Sensibility," in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, edited by Marc Manganaro, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 163-80.

[In the following essay, Handler considers Benedict's anthropological writings as representative of a "modernist sensibility. 'I

In recent works, Michael Levenson (1984) and Kathryne Lindberg (1987) have charted the tension within literary modernism between the quest for self-expression and the desire to recover a viable tradition. Both critics, in strikingly different ways, have presented the dialogue and debate between Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (among others) as emblematic of the larger opposition of individuality and tradition, or deconstructive originality and cultural constraint. In my work on the literary endeavors of Boasian anthropologists, I have examined a similar tension in the development of a culture theory that could accommodate both cultural holism and human individuality. Using Levenson and Lindberg to reexamine an essay in which I compare the literary and anthropological writings of Edward Sapir to those of Ruth Benedict, I might now offer the following formula: Pound is to Eliot as Sapir is to Benedict. Put less cryptically, the contrast between Pound's iconoclasm and Eliot's Catholicism is similar to that between Sapir's emphasis on the individual and Benedict's championing of culture. Sapir focused on the individual as a crucial locus of cultural action, and refused to reify culture, whereas Benedict emphasized cultural integration and the determination of individuals by culture.

This theoretical opposition between individual and culture can be located in the work of separate scholars (Sapir versus Benedict), but it can also be traced as a tension in the writings of either one of them. The present paper examines the interaction of the quests for individuality and tradition in the writings of Ruth Benedict. Although her developed theoretical position within anthropology places her among the champions of culture, I argue that her personal quest for self-expression led her to that position. Linked to this biographical argument is a structural argument, for I suggest that self-expression and cultural holism require each other in any formulation of the modernist sensibility.

My analysis begins with an examination of Benedict's journals, diaries and letters of the years 1912 to 1934, edited and published by Margaret Mead (1959) and exhaustively reviewed in two recent biographies of Benedict (Modell, 1983; Caffrey, 1989). Benedict's writings document a long period of personal struggle. Graduated from Vassar in 1909 with a major in English literature, Benedict traveled extensively in Europe, worked as a teacher and social worker, married and then watched her childless marriage disintegrate, tried her hand at writing both prose and poetry, and found her way to anthropology. Beginning her studies at the New School for Social Research in 1919, Benedict earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1922. Her early years in anthropology were marked by continuing self-doubt, but she seems to have crossed a threshold to professional maturity during summer field trips among Pueblo Indians in 1924 and 1925. The 1934 publication of her first book, Patterns of Culture, can be taken to mark the end, and fulfillment, of Benedict's quest for personality and achievement.

In Benedict's journals and diaries, we find the almost obsessive concern with self-realization and self-expression that is a hallmark of modernism. I take as characteristic of twentieth-century thought (of which modernism is one variety) the emergence of a fully secularized individualism. In this ethos, still prevalent today, one's highest duty is self-realization or the fullest possible development of one's personality. True to its Puritan origins, the modern personality proves its existence through work; or, phrased slightly differently, one expresses oneself through one's achievements. In the literary and scientific circles to which Benedict was drawn, work and self-expression meant the production of aesthetic objects, whether poems or scientific studies. The self—"hard," inviolable, unique, authentic—observed the world, experienced the world, mastered the world, proved itself as a locus of ultimate reality against the world. And from its observations and experiences, the self constructed intricate, original, beautifully patterned expressions. The successful products of selfexpression could then be consumed by other, lesser selves—the vast public—who were also engaged in the business of self-realization, but vicariously, via contact with the productions of artists whose lives had been deemed 'authentic' [Lionel Trilling, 1971].

The second moment of my argument charts Benedict's progress toward a mature anthropological—and personal—vision, as represented in Patterns of Culture. Benedict's private writings do not reveal a personality convinced of its own realization. Such self-assurance would come only with the publication of her first book in 1934, the last year in which Benedict published a poem. To trace Benedict's scholarly development, I focus on three articles that precede Patterns of Culture. The first ("A Brief Sketch of Serrano Culture") is a derivative piece representing Boasian anthropology as Benedict had learned it but before she had contributed to reshaping it. The latter two ("Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest" and "Configurations of Culture in North America") are preliminary versions of portions of Patterns of Culture. A third moment of my analysis relates the authorial persona of her greatest works, Patterns of Culture and The Chiysanthemum and the Sword, to the modernist quest for personality and tradition, and to the transcendence of both.

EXPERIENCE WITHOUT PATTERN

In a diary entry for December 1915, Benedict describes what she calls the "passionate blank despair" she felt when, as a freshman at Vassar in the winter of 1906, she puzzled over the purpose of life. In that mood, she read the conclusion to Walter Pater's The Renaissance:

And then came Pater. Every instant of that late afternoon is vivid to me. I even know that I had to creep to the windowseat to catch the last dim light in that bare tower room of my Freshman days. The book fell shut in my hands at the end, and it was as if my soul had been given back to me.…

Afterwards, I disbelieved. I had much in me to contradict Pater; my early religion which tried so hard to make me a moral being, my pity for others that almost made me an efficient one. But I was not run into either mould. And it is Pater's message that comes back to me as the cry of my deepest necessity: "to burn with this hard gemlike flame"—to gain from experience "this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness," to summon "the services of philosophy[,] of religion, of culture as well, to startle us into a sharp and eager observation."

Benedict's attraction to Pater epitomizes an enduring theme in her private writings: the desire to live intensely, to "have experiences" of an outer reality that prove to oneself the reality of one's personality. As she put it in another journal entry: "Anything to live! To have done with this numbness that will not let me feel." The passage concerning Pater, in which she recalls an apparently intense experience of communion with an intensity that matches the initial experience, suggests how early and how profoundly Benedict was committed to—or ensnared by—the modernist sensibility. The desire for experience, as formulated by Pater, leads in two contradictory directions: toward egoism or the cult of personality, and toward a reaction to the meaninglessness or incoherence of a reality defined solely in terms of fragmented personal experiences. In Levenson's genealogy of modernism, mid-Victorians such as Matthew Arnold attempted to ground Christian belief in personal experience instead of dogmatic assertion. But after Arnold, Pater "recognized… that to redefine traditional values as phases of the self was to weaken traditional sanctions.… [S]ubjectivity was a double-edged sword. In the hands of Pater, it was used not only to cut away the metaphysical, but also the traditionally moral, the traditionally religious, the objective and the permanent."

The follower of Pater, then, was left alone with the self. Benedict wanted to "realize" or develop that self, but she craved also a source of stability or order beyond the self. On the one hand, her private writings are replete with admonishments to believe in her own personality:

I have been reading Walt Whitman, and Jeifries' Story of My Heart. They are alike in their superb enthusiasm for life[,] … their unwavering, ringing belief that the Me within them is of untold worth and importance. I read in wonder and admiration—in painful humility. Does this sense of personal worth, this enthusiasm for one's own personality, belong only to great selfexpressive souls? or to a mature period of life I have not yet attained?

On the other hand, Benedict describes herself as unfulfilled by episodical epiphanies unconnected to larger patterns of significance: "The trouble is not that we are never happy—it is that happiness is so episodical.… I cannot see what holds it all together."

Benedict knew, however, what could not hold it all together: conventional culture. In 1912 she described her "real me" as hidden behind the "mask" she had donned in choosing the role of school-teacher. Later she described as "distractions" the customary rituals, such as funerals and weddings, that anthropology would teach her to examine more respectfully: "All our ceremonies, our observances, are for the weak who are cowards before the bare thrust of feeling." And elsewhere she spoke with mild contempt of the conformity of the masses, "lost and astray unless the tune has been set for them, … the spring of their own personalities touched from the outside."

Benedict was also dissatisfied with nonconventional answers to her existential dilemmas, even those formulated by the great creative personalities of history:

The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so many answers. There's the answer of Christ and of Buddha, of Thomas a Kempis and of Elbert Hubbard, of Browning, Keats and of Spinoza, of Thoreau and of Walt Whitman, of Kant and of Théodore Roosevelt. By turns their answers fit my needs. And yet, because I am I and not any one of them, they can none of them be completely mine.

Here an "answer," a believable and believed-in moral system, seems of less moment than the need of the personality to appropriate such an answer as "mine." As Benedict's meditation continued, she admitted that moral questions are never solved. "What we call 'answers' are, rather, attitudes taken by different temperaments toward certain characteristic problems—even the interrogation may be an 'answer'." The phrasing is egocentric ("attitudes," "temperaments") and relativistic—a striking prefigurement of the position developed later in Patterns of Cultire, where authentic cultures are portrayed not as "answers" but as existential attitudes in terms of which both answers and questions are constructed.

In addition to the quest for personality and the rejection of convention—quintessentially modernist themes—Benedict's private writings reveal a painfully explicit consciousness of the dilemmas that the task of self-realization posed for women. She wavered between a belief that woman's "instinctive" vocation is domestic, and a reluctance to sacrifice apparently masculine aspirations to the domestic role. "[Niature lays a compelling and very distressing hand upon woman," she wrote shortly after her marriage in 1914 to Stanley Benedict. Women might deny "that the one gift in our treasure house is love." However, their quests for fulfillment—"in social work, in laboratories, in schools," with marriage considered merely "a possible factor in our lives"—would end in failure. At other times, however, Benedict sensed that the sacrifice of self and self-development to domestic duties could not but lead to frustration, bitterness, and waste. After a year of marriage she felt that she needed a career or mission beyond her marriage: "it is wisdom in motherhood as in wifehood to have one's own individual world of effort and creation." Later she wrote that woman's sacrifice of self to family was both socially wasteful and psychologically harmful. Whatever natural differences there might be between the sexes—another question to be settled by anthropological inquiry!—both men and women had to face up to the "responsibility for achievement of a four-square personality." Yet disparities in culturally constructed gender roles (as we would say today) made the pursuit of self-development more problematic for women than for men: "The issue … is fine free living in the spirit world of socialized spiritual values—for men as for women. But owing to artificial actual conditions their problems are strikingly different." Small wonder that the first anthropology course in which Benedict enrolled was "Sex in Ethnology," taught by Elsie Clews Parsons.

As Benedict struggled to find her way, she sensed that fulfillment was most readily accessible to her in literary endeavor. As a child she had received familial encouragement for her writing, and later, she could record in her journal that "my best, my thing 'that in all my years I tend to do' is surely writing." "I long to prove myself by writing," she wrote in 1917, but her problem was to find an appropriate voice and genre. Her first major effort was biography, as she planned a book charting the lives of three famous women. She wrote at least six drafts of an essay on Mary Wollstonecraft, but was unable to finish the project after it was rejected for publication in 1919. As Modell has suggested, Benedict sought in biography to see life whole, to discover her own personal integrity by constructing storied, hence coherent, accounts of women whose lives had been judged by their contemporaries to be out of control. But the biographer could not achieve a satisfactory distance from her subjects: their lives and problems seemed too much her own. We can say the same thing of Benedict's poetry, which she wrote on and off for years: in her poems she could not achieve the "hard," polished self that she desired. Rather, her poems tended to express an unhappy and fragmented self, at times almost hysterically out of control.

Benedict's search for a literary voice is linked to still another recurrent theme in her private writings, summarized by what she called "detachment." Coupled antithetically to her desire to experience the world with the intensity that Pater advocated is her fear of that intensity. "I dread intense awareness," she wrote in her diary in 1923, on the day that she completed the writing of her doctoral thesis. Yet, having admitted the fear, she went on to express fear of its opposite: "And then it seems to me terrible that life is passing, that my program is to fill the twenty-four hours each day with obliviousness." By contrast, "detachment" seems to have represented a transcendence of both fears:

I divide the riches of the mind into two kingdoms: the kingdom of knowledge, where the reason gives understanding, and the kingdom of wisdom, where detachment gives understanding. This detachment is the life of the spirit, and its fruit is wisdom. That would cover it fairly well—the life of the artist and the life of the mystic. Its essence is its immediacy—without the distractions of belief or anxiety. It has no dogmas, it has no duties. It is a final synthesis of knowledge, and it is also a laying aside of knowledge.

Here Benedict envisions an almost utopian solution to the modernist quest. It couples Pater's immediacy to a coherence of perspective that transcends the purely personal. Moreover, transpersonal coherence is not bought at the expense of personal integrity. There will be, Benedict tells us, no "distractions of belief or anxiety," no "dogmas" or "duties." It is almost as if she sought the vision, the voice, the perspective of a god, or of an omniscient narrator.

Drawing together these fragments of Benedict's private writings, we find a neat model of the modernist sensibility. Benedict sought to realize an authentic personality in an individually chosen career or lifework. Although tempted by conventional roles, including domestic duties and female professions, she found herself unable to settle for them. Coupled with her quest for self-realization was the desire to discover an authentic moral order, but such an order had to be acceptable to her personality and temperament. Thus, writing, through which one might create order in a fragmented world, came to represent a solution to her. Anthropology would give her the institutional framework within which to forge an alternative genre.

MASTERING PATTERN

When Ruth Benedict came to anthropology, the Boasian school was beginning a transition from the study of the distribution of isolated culture "traits" to the study of cultural wholes and the processes whereby traits are assembled to form such wholes. Boas had spent several decades attacking nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology. He argued that evolutionary schemes of universal history were based upon ethnocentric and unreliable categories, and demonstrated their improbability when confronted with empirical studies of the diffusion and distribution of culture traits. But the ethnographic research that permitted Boas and his students to trace the empirical (as opposed to speculative) origins of culture traits raised new questions. How did such traits come to be amalgamated into living cultures, and what was the nature of the integrative force that held amalgamated traits together? To the latter question, Ruth Benedict's work would provide an important answer.

Like many of Boas's students, Benedict wrote a library dissertation treating not culture wholes but the diffusion of culture traits. (It was entitled The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America.) The summer before she completed her dissertation, she traveled to Southern California to do "salvage ethnography" on an apparently disappearing Amerindian group, the Serrano. It is unclear whether Benedict lived among the Serrano for any length of time, or stayed mainly with her mother and sister in Los Angeles. Her work consisted in interviewing aging informants about past customs. In any case, not until her trip to Zuni in the summer of 1924 did Benedict experience what she considered to be her professional initiation, doing fieldwork in a living culture. She returned to the Pueblos the next summer, and made further field trips to the Southwest in 1927 and 1931.

According to Margaret Mead, "Anthropology made the first 'sense' that any ordered approach to life had ever made to Ruth Benedict." She arrived at Columbia at a time when "Boas was still interested in diffusion and in having his students laboriously trace a trait or a theme from culture to culture." Benedict's dissertation on the guardian spirit was just such a tracing, but apparently the work of poring over the technical literature on Amerindian culture did not discourage her: "A good day at relationship [that is, kinship] systems—not Mohave however," is a typical diary entry from 1923. Her field trips to the Pueblos seem to have marked a personal turning point for Benedict. Writing to Mead in 1925 from the Pefia Blanca Pueblo, she described her newly won confidence: "three years ago it [a month's isolation] would have been enough to fill me with terror. I was always afraid of depressions getting too much for me … But that's ancient history now."

"A Brief Sketch of Serrano Culture" was Benedict's first publication based on her own field materials (she had already published her dissertation and an article based on it). Modell points out that Serrano was a culture about which Benedict "had trouble writing … partly because data were scant and partly because she did not see a design in the disparate remaining elements of Serrano culture." The article is organized in terms of standard ethnological categories, with major sections on "Social Organization," "Ceremonial Observances," "Shamanism," and "Material Culture." Benedict announces at the outset that she will do little more than report "information … [that] is almost entirely exoteric," for "a great deal of the old meaning … is undoubtedly lost." From her perspective, the Serrano, like the anthropologist herself, faced the dilemma of a meaningless existence: "It is largely by guesswork that they can give the meaning of any of the ceremonial songs; and any religious connotation in such practices as rock-painting, for instance, is now unknown." However, it is equally possible that the anthropologist's quest for authenticity generated questions that informants could not answer, and thus led Benedict to perceive their situation as meaningless.

Benedict's Serrano article is little more than a listing of traits. Significantly, items that Benedict would bring together in later publications as elements of an internally meaningful ceremonial complex are here reported under different headings.… Also significant is the absence in this early work of holistic comparisons, for the placing of whole cultures side by side would become a cornerstone of her later narrative and epistemological method. By contrast, in the Serrano essay, cross-cultural comparison is confined to traits, as it typically is in the work of both evolutionists and diffusionists. For example, Benedict points out that Serrano joking relationships seem congruent with a form of moiety organization well known in the literature, but that kinship terms and joking status do not coincide as they should in the standard moiety system. Benedict's discussion here demonstrates deference to the authority of a technical jargon, but it lacks conviction. The article ends, abruptly and almost surrealistically, with a section on food. Describing Serrano methods for harvesting and preparing mesquite, nuts, and deer, Benedict tells us in the final sentence of the essay that "[t]he bones were pounded in mortars while fresh, and eaten in a sort of paste."

In the four years between the Serrano article and the first of the papers that resulted from the Pueblo field trips, Benedict reformulated Boasian anthropology into her own approach, in which, as Modell puts it, "culture wholeness became her disciplinary idea." As suggested, other American anthropologists were moving in the direction that Benedict took. Particularly important was a well-known essay by her close colleague Sapir, entitled "Culture, Genuine and Spurious," one of the first statements in American anthropology concerning what Benedict would call cultural integration. Benedict was also influenced by Jung and by the Gestalt psychologists, as well as by her reading of German philosophers of history such as Spengler and Dilthey. In 1928 she presented a paper on "Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest" and in 1932 published "Configurations of Culture in North America." These papers, and a third on "Anthropology and the Abnormal," published in 1934, together contain most of the central arguments of Patterns of Culture.

Benedict's key idea was that cultures are configured or integrated around one or a few dominant drives, themes, or patterns. The obverse of the ongoing diffusion of culture traits is the absorption of borrowed traits into a preexistent culture whole. Benedict argued (in almost unavoidably personifying terms) that each culture selects from material available to be borrowed, as well as from the creative productions of its own members, and reinterprets the materials it chooses to incorporate. Such selection and reinterpretation are to be accounted for by the existence of a "fundamental psychological set" or "configuration" that can be taken to characterize and permeate the culture as a whole.

The 1928 paper on "Psychological Types" confines itself to these points, exemplified in a contrast Benedict draws between the Pueblos and other Native American cultures of the Southwest. She begins where the diffusionists leave off, pointing out that the most striking feature of Pueblo culture—its ceremonialism—hardly distinguishes it from other Native American cultures, since most of them also show "high ritualistic development." The difference, according to Benedict, lies in the spirit of Pueblo ceremonialism: the two groups of cultures differ in their "fundamental psychological sets," which she labels with terms taken from Nietzsche: "Apollonian" and "Dionysian." The Apollonian Pueblos share with their neighbors such religious and ceremonial traits as hallucinogenics, fasting, and the vision quest. However, the Pueblos have purged from these traits all traces of Dionysian ecstasy. Whereas diffusionists were content to plot the distribution of traits and trait complexes, Benedict sought to portray whole cultures by interpreting the inner spirit that knits traits together into a way of life that is meaningful and coherent to those who live it. As she concludes, "It is not only that the understanding of this psychological set is necessary for a descriptive statement of this culture; without it the cultural dynamics of this region are unintelligible."

A more sophisticated version of these arguments is found in the 1932 essay on North American culture configurations. There, Benedict draws on the interpretive philosophies of history of Dilthey and Spengler in order to develop her notion of a culture's psychological set. She does not abandon psychologistic concepts, but enlarges her notion of culture so that her arguments can no longer be dismissed as psychological reductionism. Moreover, Benedict's comparative hermeneutics of culture is now developed in stunning fashion, setting up a paradoxical resolution to the modernist quest for holism.

Benedict begins by reviewing the "anecdotal" status of most of the ethnological data compiled in the past. These data, she claims, have been presented as "detached objects" with no attention to "their setting or function in the culture from which they came." She then praises Boas's field studies and Malinowski's functionalism as representative of a new anthropology that has begun to study cultures in holistic fashion. But Malinowski's functionalism is inadequate, she argues, because once it has shown that "each trait functions in the total cultural complex," it stops—without considering "in what sort of a whole these traits are functioning." In other words, analysis of a functioning whole differs from that of a meaningful whole, a distinction basic to Boasian anthropology, the roots of which lay deep in German historicism. As Sapir puts it, in his essay on genuine culture, "A magical ritual, for instance, which, when considered psychologically, seems to liberate and give form to powerful emotional aesthetic elements of our nature, is nearly always put in harness to some humdrum utilitarian end—the catching of rabbits or the curing of disease." Not only is the "emotional aesthetic" meaning of culture different from its function, it is, for Sapir and Benedict, more basic. Boas, Sapir, and Benedict all argue that humans rationalize—or invent reasons to justify—those aspects of their culture of which they become conscious. But they remain unconscious of the formal patterns (as in the grammar of one's language) that provide the ultimate ordering in culture. Thus Benedict takes care to distinguish the configurational order that she is trying to describe from the functional order of Malinowski:

The order that is achieved is not merely the reflection of the fact that each trait has a pragmatic function that it performs—which is much like a great discovery in physiology that the normal eye sees and the normally muscled hand grasps, or … the discovery that nothing exists in human life that mankind has not espoused and rationalized. The order is due rather to the circumstance that in these societies a principle has been set up according to which the assembled cultural material is made over into consistent patterns in accordance with certain inner necessities that have developed within the group.

Benedict's phrasing continues to be evocative and imprecise—"principle," "consistent patterns," "inner necessities." However, her ensuing discussion, drawing on Dilthey and Spengler, makes it clear that culture has become for her a question of the meaning of life, as such meanings are constructed or patterned for the members of each culture. Disparate traits, assembled into a culture from heterogeneous sources, can be understood only in terms of the particular meaningful configuration of that culture; they take their meaning from their place in the pattern, not from their origins or function:

Traits objectively similar and genetically allied may be utilized in different configurations.… The relevant facts are the emotional background against which the act takes place in the two cultures. It will illustrate this if we imagine the Pueblo snake dance in the setting of our own society. Among the Western Pueblo, at least, repulsion is hardly felt for the snake.… When we identify ourselves with them we are emotionally poles apart, though we put ourselves meticulously into the pattern of their behavior.

Although Benedict speaks here of emotional attitudes, the issue is, more broadly, one of cultural interpretation. In her example, we are asked to imagine ourselves in the place of the snake dancers. Without an understanding of the meaning of the snake in Pueblo culture, we will impose our own, Western understanding on the ethnographic material, and thus misinterpret the dance, however meticulously we note its external details. Sapir makes a similar argument in a 1927 essay on "The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society," an essay that Benedict must have known. Sapir, like Benedict, concocts a thought "experiment." He asks the reader to imagine "making a painstaking report of the actions of a group of natives engaged in some form of activity, say religious, to which he has not the cultural key." A "skillful writer," Sapir suggests, will get the external details right, but his account of the significance of the activity to the natives "will be guilty of all manner of distortion… It becomes actually possible to interpret as base what is inspired by the noblest and even holiest of motives, and to see altruism or beauty where nothing of the kind is either felt or intended." Sapir goes on to speculate about how it is that natives can regularly reproduce in their behavior cultural patterns of which they have no conscious awareness. By contrast, Benedict's discovery of cultural patterning leads her to issue a programmatic call to her colleagues to reorient field research in order to document the patterns of particular cultures. For her, the anthropologist's ability to master pattern was never in doubt. It was the anthropologist's business to stand aside and describe in objective terms the cultural patterns that make life meaningful for the peoples under study.

Yet Benedict's interpretive method is fundamentally comparative and hermeneutic. It thus implies the impossibility of objective descriptions of individual cultures—or, more precisely, of descriptions constructed by an observer occupying neutral ground. In the "Configurations" article, as in Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, cultures are never described in isolation. Rather, their characteristic configurations or patterns are delineated by way of contrast with the patterns of other cultures. Thus, a Benedictian description of a culture depends as much upon which culture the observer/writer chooses as the relevant point of comparison as it does upon the "facts" of the culture in question. As we have seen, the essay on "Psychological Types" is largely taken up with elaborating on the distinction between the Apollonian Pueblos and their Dionysian neighbors. A similar method is developed to a high art in "Configurations." There Benedict rehearses again the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction. However, not content to stop there, she introduces other, crosscutting contrasts:

In the face of the evident opposition of these two … types of behavior it is at first sight somewhat bizarre to group them together over against another type in contrast to which they are at one. It is true nevertheless. In their different contexts, the Southwest and the Plains [her example of Dionysian cultures] are alike in not capitalizing ideas of pollution and dread.… In contrast with the non-Pueblo Southwest, for instance, these two are alike in realistically directing their behavior toward the loss-situation instead of romantically elaborating the danger situation.

Benedict goes on to elaborate this realist-romantic distinction in a long review of attitudes toward the dead. She is now working with three cultural configurations: Apollonian realists (Pueblo), Dionysian realists (Plains), and Dionysian romantics (non-Pueblo Southwest). However, each discrete type comes into being, as it were, only by way of a contrast deliberately elaborated by the anthropologist. In other words, Pueblo and Plains, distinguished by the Apollonian/Dionysian contrast, turn out to be similar, as realists, when opposed to other cultures that can be characterized as romantics. Finally, Benedict introduces a fourth configuration, that of the "megalomaniacal" Northwest coast cultures. These peoples, too, are Dionysian, but their institutionalization of the "pursuit of personal aggrandizement" represents a new crosscutting of the Dionysian temperament. This yields a configuration that can be contrasted as significantly to the Dionysian realists of the Plains as to the Apollonian Pueblos.

At this point it is worth noting that the cultural configurations that serve as the apparently holistic units in Benedict's comparisons are themselves synthetic, built by the anthropologist from multiple ethnographic sources. Consider, for example, the following sketch of a Dionysianromantic ritual:

Years ago in the government warfare against the Apache the inexorable purification ceremonies of the Pima almost canceled their usefulness to the United States troops as allies. Their loyalty and bravery were undoubted, but upon the killing of an enemy each slayer must retire for twenty days of ceremonial purification. He selected a ceremonial father who cared for him and performed the rites. This father had himself taken life and been through the purification ceremonies. He sequestered the slayer in the bush in a small pit where he remained fasting for sixteen days.… Among the Papago the father feeds him on the end of a long pole. His wife must observe similar taboos in her own house … etc.

The footnotes to this passage list four sources, including Benedict's field notes, from which the account is constructed. From the mass of details afforded by the sources, she begins with one that emphasizes the practical consequences of an interpretive contrast. The ethnographer, Frank Russell, had noted that "The bravery of the Pimas was praised by all army officers … but Captain Bourke and others have complained of their unreliability, due solely to their rigid observance of this religious law." Just as Americans might read the Western horror of snakes into the Pueblo snake dance, and thus misunderstand it, so American army officers had mistranslated Piman religiosity as "unreliability." It is with this maximal contrast that Benedict chooses to begin her portrait of the rituals.

As Benedict's account develops, she individualizes general information, bringing readers closer to the authentic existence of the natives: "the Pima" (plural) becomes two people acting out a particular ritual: "He selected a ceremonial As father. had himself … This taken father us through the narration the by now takes personalized life… ritual, a "culture trait" from elsewhere is injected: a custom of the Papago that is strikingly illustrative of the Dionysian-romantic horror that Benedict wishes to stress. Note that the narration returns without explicit transition from the Papago father to the Piman wife. To be sure, the Papago were "closely related" to the Pima. Moreover, the implicit epistemology of Benedict's comparative method justifies her lumping together similar or related groups in order to contrast them, as a holistic culture configuration, to other peoples grouped together as representative of an opposing configuration. Yet the synthetic nature of her culture configurations is belied by much of the rhetoric and organization of Patterns of Culture, the first book in which she spoke to the public in the coherent voice of a scientist and professional writer.

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST AS MODERNIST PERSONA

Ruth Benedict's most widely known work, read by several generations of American college students, presents her theory of culture illustrated with three apparently neatly bounded, holistic cultures. It is this image of a world of discrete cultures that undergraduates most easily retain. However, a close reading of Patterns of Culture will show that Benedict's comparative hermeneutic is vigorously at work even in a book whose core consists of three separate chapters devoted to three unproblematically separate cultures. This is obvious in chapter four, on "The Pueblos of New Mexico," which is an expanded version of the 1930 and 1932 articles, continuing the presentation of the Pueblos in terms of the Apollonian/Dionysian contrast. Her contrastive method is also apparent in the final two chapters, devoted to the problem of the individual and society. There, Benedict becomes a subtle but pointed critic of American culture, discussing American aggressiveness and competition in the comparative light of Pueblo sobriety and Northwest Coast megalomania. In other words, her own culture became an important contrastive focus in her work. Indeed, her final book, the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, is more than a study of "Patterns of Japanese Culture," as its subtitle proclaims. Beyond that, it is a sustained contrast between American individualism and Japanese hierarchy in which almost every assertion about Japan is brought home by means of contrastive material on American culture.

But to return to Patterns of Culture: the comparative aspects of the narrative notwithstanding, the book can easily be read as a description of three distinct cultures. The sixth chapter, "The Northwest Coast of America," elaborates the discussion begun in the 1932 article. However, the mediating configurations of that essay—Dionysian realists and romantics—have been eliminated, as has the argument about crosscutting configurational dimensions. The sixth chapter thus presents the Pueblos' Dionysian opposite, but it does so in such a way that the hermeneutic construction of a contrast is hidden, and cultural differences are made to seem solely a function of "objective" differences in two "on-the-ground" cultures. Moreover, chapter five, based on Reo Fortune's Melanesian material from Dobu, presents an example drawn from the opposite side of the globe, in place of the mediating North American examples used earlier. Thus is the geographical and configurational gradualism of the "Configurations" article replaced by three apparently well-separated and starkly contrasted culture wholes.

An individualizing vision, then, prevails in Patterns of Culture, despite the hermeneutic twist implicit in Benedict's comparative method. The holistic culture sought by alienated modernists is there discovered in portraits of three "collective individuals," to use Louis Dumont's term. That term is peculiarly apt, given Benedict's characterization of cultures as "individual psychology thrown large upon the screen, given gigantic proportions and a long time span." Indeed, I would argue that modern social theory (dating from at least the eighteenth century) swings back and forth between reified conceptions of the individual (as in utilitarianism) and reified conceptions of society and culture (as in most twentieth-century sociology and anthropology). The modernists' quest for what Sapir called "genuine culture" was motivated in part by their perception that an atomistic, rationalistic science had destroyed tradition. But the modernist's genuine culture cannot, in the final analysis, be discovered by a social science that constructs cultural wholes on individualistic principles. Indeed, embodied in governmental policies, modernist social science paradoxically leads away from holism to the routinization of all aspects of social life, bureaucratically fragmented and administered.

These remarks on the individualistic premises implicit in the theory of cultural integration return us to Benedict's notion of detachment. In Patterns of Culture Benedict discovered the authentic, holistic cultures that she sought and from which the modern world excluded her as a participant. The Apollonian, anti-individualistic Pueblos are described with an almost utopian longing, for in them, apparently, the surrender of individuality to society is not even problematic. Here there is no question of conventional ceremonies repressing individual feelings (recall Benedict's rejection of funerals and weddings in her own society). But even in cultures that demanded that individuals assert themselves, as on the Northwest coast, the thorough determination of individual personality by cultural configuration meant that individuals were unselfconscious in their individualism. Sapir, in his essay on genuine culture, writes of cultural authenticity in terms of sincerity, but Benedict objects to the argument: "It seems to me that cultures may be built solidly and harmoniously upon fantasies, fear-constructs, or inferiority complexes and indulge to the limit in hypocrisy and pretensions." Her rejection of sincerity perhaps reflects the search for that intense yet detached cultural participation that she described in her journal. Sincerity implies self-consciousness, and Benedict sought worlds in which meaningfulness and participation could exist without such an awareness. The Northwest Coast potlatcher could pursue megalomaniacal successes unhindered by modernist self-doubt.

Detachment was also to be found in the persona of the scientist. As an anthropologist-narrator, Benedict wrote into being the holistic, genuine cultures that no longer existed in the modernist's world. At the same time, she preserved her own individuality, controlling and inviolate as a narrative voice. It seems clear that the voice of the scientist and the genre of scientific writing worked for Benedict: through them she achieved the "hard" personality that she desired but could not achieve as a writer of poetry and biography. In her anthropological writing she did not eliminate all reference to herself, to the "I." But that "I" was now a scientist, a cultural anthropologist working within an established community of scholars possessed of their own techniques and discourse. For example, in the first chapter of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the authorial voice identifies itself in a variety of terms, shifting among them gracefully and apparently unproblematically. "In June, 1944, I was assigned to the study of Japan.… As a cultural anthropologist… I had confidence in certain techniques and postulates which could be used.… The anthropologist has good proof in his experience that even bizarre behavior does not prevent one's understanding it.… The student who is trying to uncover the assumptions upon which Japan builds its way of life has a far harder task than statistical validation." Thus, in spite of the book's hermeneutic method—Japan and America are each interpreted in terms of what the other is not—the narrative is presided over by an apparently objective persona. Indeed, that persona is more than objective: it is detached, its existence grounded either in its own individuality, or in the universal comprehension of science.

Ruth Benedict's conquest of a voice and a personality as she moved through biography and poetry to anthropology might be summarily described in the words of James Joyce's young artist:

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak.… The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

This is a famous passage, one "indelible in the memory of readers of a certain age," as Lionel Trilling puts it. Ruth Benedict was of that modernist age, and in her anthropological writing she achieved the integral personality that she and so many of her contemporaries sought. The achievement of integrity depended upon writing about—or writing into existence—cultures that could be seen to be whole, holistic, and authentic. That postcolonial, postmodern anthropology has produced a spate of biographies, histories, and literary-critical analyses of our ancestors testifies, perhaps, to an inauthenticity that we perceive in ourselves, and that we try to escape by writing the storied lives of others.