SOURCE: "Ruth Benedict," in Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the History of Anthropology, edited by Sydel Silverman, Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 141-70.

[Mintz is an American anthropologist who has written extensively on the cultures of Caribbean countries. In the following essay, he examines the way in which Benedict's anthropological writings reflected her personal character and concerns.]

Ruth Benedict, whom Margaret Mead described as "one of the first women to attain major stature as a social scientist," came to anthropology relatively late in life, in comparison with her contemporaries. She discovered anthropology only after a long search, and after having sought fulfillment in many other pursuits, only one of which—writing poetry—seems to have provided her with deep satisfaction. Having discovered anthropology, she was to become one of its most distinguished and distinctive practitioners. It is because certain of her unusual and highly original contributions now appear to have been forgotten or ignored that I will offer here what is only a narrow view of her scholarship.

Benedict was born in 1887, the older of the two daughters of Dr. and Mrs. Frederick S. Fulton. Her father died while she was still a baby, and only a few weeks before the birth of her sister. The girls' mother did not remarry, and grieved her loss unremittingly. The emotional qualities of her widowhood lay very heavily on the children, as did, it appears, the economic constraints it imposed. Reading Benedict's own words, quoted at length in Mead's two books about her, one gets the impression of a saddened, often dreary childhood, wherein the moments of happiness came most freely when the little girl could play by herself, and enjoy her own fantasies. She was partially deaf, due to a childhood illness; and Mead gives the impression that most people (including her mother) preferred her more cheerful younger sister, Margery.

Benedict went to Vassar College, where she studied English literature. After graduation she taught school, somewhat desultorily. In 1913, when she was 26, she affianced herself to Stanley Benedict, who is described as a promising young biochemist. The ensuing years, when she lived in a Westchester suburb and worked at being a good housewife, must have been barren and bleak. Mead's citations from Benedict's letters and journal document her attempts to keep up her spirits and to accept her role as a dutiful wife. But she was not happy. At some point she learned that she could not have children, at least not without what Mead calls "a very problematic operation," for which her husband would not give his consent. Though she finished her long-planned essay on Mary Wollstonecraft—a portion of an important work on women she had conceived earlier—it was rejected for publication. Only in her poetry did she manage some early success. There, she concealed her own identity with pen names until well into her anthropological career; and though poetry remained important throughout her life as a form of expression and as a basis for strong bonds of friendship, it never became enough to fulfill her wholly.

It was in 1919 that Benedict happened upon anthropology; she took courses at the New School for Social Research with Alexander Goldenweiser and Elsie Clews Parsons, and was deeply affected by what she began to learn from these two radically different teachers. At that time she had been married for five years; and while neither she nor her husband appears to have been ready to confess failure, their marriage by this time was merely standing still. As Benedict's interest in anthropology grew, her husband's interest in her life seems to have declined the more. Much stimulated by what she was learning, Benedict became Boas' student; he accepted her on Parsons' urging. With Boas' blessing, she completed her doctorate at Columbia in three semesters.

From the publication of her dissertation in 1923 until Boas' retirement in 1936, Benedict remained at his side almost uninterruptedly. After his retirement, she continued to play a key role—though it was often obscured—both at Columbia and in the profession at large. Her work won her an international reputation, especially after the publication of Patterns of Culture. But she was not elected president of the American Anthropological Association until 1947-48; and it was only in July, 1948, that Columbia saw fit to bestow upon her a full professorship, in a shamefully tardy attempt to make up for its previous treatment of a great scholar. At that time, Benedict had been teaching at Columbia for twenty-six years, the final twelve of them as an associate professor. She died two months later.

During her lifetime, Benedict's work was the subject of many reviews and evaluations. After her death, Mead wrote two important biographies of her—startlingly different in emphasis and interpretation, it seems to me—and others have also taken Benedict as their subject. In the accounts that have been written of her, much has been made of the enigmatic qualities of her character and of the contradictory forces that appears to have governed her—such as the conflict of marriage and motherhood versus a career, and of poetry versus anthropology. I should like to suggest that these contradictory forces are to a large extent played out, enacted as it were, in Benedict's scientific work: not that she "solved" any of her personal conflicts by becoming an anthropologist, so much as that the kind of anthropology she did actualized those conflicts. My feeling is that in Ruth Benedict, as in few others, a consistency of character, of calling, and of theoretical conception can be identified. That is, her anthropology was, in some basic way, her own self embodied.

I will mention three themes of her work to illustrate what I mean. First, the concern with coherence. This reverberates in Benedict's work; she was, from her first papers onward, very sensitive to what looked like coherence or consistency within a cultural system. It would be fair to hazard a guess that Benedict liked it when it all fell into place, that she got aesthetic satisfaction out of closure in her descriptions of culture. Second is the concern with a dominant strain as the expression of that coherence. This reveals itself particularly in Patterns of Culture. In Boas' slightly evasive introduction to the book, he indicates his feeling, much as Benedict does herself, that some societies reveal a coherence and a dominant strain, and others do not. I think her work shows that Benedict found it aesthetically more satisfying, intellectually more gratifying, to deal with cultures that could be summed up in rather limited, dense terms. The adjectival renderings that typify her descriptions of the three major cultures in Patterns of Culture express this notion of a dominant trend. Finally, and most surprising in view of her training, was Benedict's repeated reversion to the notions of choice—that societies, or cultures, choose some particular direction out of the great arc of human variability, that there is choice for them much as there is choice for individuals.

I suggest, then, that the search for cultural harmony of parts in a single system, the preference for those systems that seemed to her to manifest some single dominant theme, and above all the idea that peoples choose their cultures, get only one, and then sometimes lose it irrevocably—remember her phrase about the cup which is fashioned and the cup being broken—that these views embody the conflicted personality of their inventor and the particular life circumstances in which she found herself. One had the feeling with Dr. Benedict that beauty and calm, and tolerance and humor, and life itself, had been very dearly bought. How was that communicated? I have not the slightest idea. But as with no one else I have known, I had the sense that Ruth Benedict was a person who all along had made choices, and that the notion of making choices was immensely important to her as an integral personality.

I wish to touch on two aspects of Benedict's work, before referring briefly to her personal influence on me. The first has to do with Benedict's contribution to an anthropology of the immediate, the relevant, and—lest it be forgotten—the political; the second relates to Benedict's contributions to an anthropology of modern life, particularly through her efforts to study national states and cultures.

"In the 1930's," writes Mead, "Ruth Benedict often chafed at the amount of energy Boas devoted to 'good works' and lamented the time lost to research and writing. But as the Nazi crisis deepened in Europe and World War II approached, she who had so vigorously rejected such good works was in the end drawn into them." Because of her espousal of cultural relativism, Benedict has sometimes been thought to have been politically uncommitted or neutral. This is a misreading, I believe, of her ideas; nor did her cultural relativism mean she was politically naive.

In his paper "American Anthropologists and American Society," Eric Wolf has elegantly described American anthropology of the period during which Benedict's work had its early impact: the faith in human malleability, seen as nearly infinite; the educational process as an Aladdin's lamp of progress; democratic pluralism as the American way; and an unconcern with power and its nature. I think Wolf's argument is illuminating, persuasive, and generally accurate. But I don't think Benedict was at all unaware of, or unconcerned with, the nature of power. Indeed, I think both Benedict and Boas were well aware of the problem power posed, and I am not even sure that they were really guilty of an overgenerous optimism about such power, even if they sometimes may have seemed actuated by such optimism. Anthropology at Columbia clearly suffered because Boas was outspoken and willing to take controversial stands—much more would have come his way had he kept his mouth shut—and his colleagues and students suffered with him. Long before Benedict became an anthropologist, Boas had managed to make himself highly unpopular in the United States, particularly in connection with his views on World War I. As a German and a Jew, he was already suspect; the stands he took on war, peace, spies, and nationalism only made him more so. His stress upon the equal potentialities of different races; upon culture as the distinctive attainment of the human species as a whole; upon the difficult social and psychological position of nonwhite people in the United States; and upon other politically sensitive issues earned him the enduring enmity or hostility of many of his professional contemporaries. To a varying degree, his students suffered because of his courageous outspokenness. Some imaginatively enlarged the distance that separated them from his views; others merely ignored the positions he took. Benedict seems to have paid little attention to Boas' public political stance until long after she received her degree. But she emphatically did not seek to disassociate herself from him.

During the years of World War II, Benedict became actively involved in the winning of the war itself; the intellectual achievements of her later years are intimately connected to the war experience. Beyond the meaning to her of personal involvement in a crucial test of American survival, however, in her work and perhaps for the first time, Benedict grasped fully the profound political implications of anthropology. Many of us are, I believe, familiar with the principal limitations of the cultural relativism and pluralism which Benedict espoused and believed in; perhaps we should be equally aware of the very positive aspects of these perspectives.

To begin, Benedict devoted a substantial portion of her intellectual energies from 1940 onward to fighting racial prejudice. Those of us old enough to remember what the treatment of racial minorities in this country was like at that time (even if we cannot be consoled by the present) ought to be able to see why the positions taken by people such as Boas and Benedict were absolutely essential to change. Yet it will not be enough simply to yea-say their work. Some of Benedict's views are worth citing at length these days—which is to say, the days of Ardrey, Jensen, Schockley, and Herrnstein, not to mention DeFunis, Bakke, and Weber:

Those who hope for better minority relations need to consider equally, when they think out their strategy, the assets as well as the liabilities. The greatest asset we have in the United States is the public policy of the state. This is not to say that our Federal government, our states, our police forces, and our courts have been blameless; of course they have not. But as compared with the grass-roots discriminations and segregations current in the United States, public policy has been a brake, and not an incentive. This would not necessarily be remarkable in a country run, for example, by a benevolent dictator, but in a democracy where the people have a voice in selecting their legislators and their judges, it is something to ponder. The correspondence between popular prejudices and state action has been far from being one-to-one. In states where opinion polls and strong labor unions and powerful industries have been against hiring men without regard to color or creed or national origin, it has still been possible to get Fair Employment Acts passed. In cities where there is a quota for Jewish students in privately endowed colleges, there is no quota for Jews in the taxsupported city colleges. When New York State Negroes protest today that private medical colleges are willing to train such a bare minimum of Negro doctors that the supply is totally inadequate, they unquestioningly propose a state medical college to remedy the situation. In areas where there are restrictive covenants and "Jim Crow" city blocks, city and Federal housing authorities have been able to insist upon and administer housing projects which have both Negro and white tenants. Even in this present postwar year [1947] when the record of civil liberties has been deteriorating, Chicago ruled against a "lily-white" policy in its new veterans' homes, and when a mob attacked the houses let to Negroes, the largest police force Chicago had ever called out was stationed to protect them. In Gary, Indiana, when white school children and their parents struck against allowing Negroes in the schools, the mayor broke the strike by use of the tenancy laws and upheld the city's policy on nonsegregation. On October 30, President Truman accepted as "a charter of human freedom in our times" a strong report on civil liberties for minorities written by the Civil Rights Committee which he had "created with a feeling of urgency," and which recommended laws to end segregation, poll tax and lynchings, the enactment of permanent Fair Employment Acts and of statutes to prohibit Federal or state financial assistance to public or private agencies "permitting discrimination and segregation based on race, color, creed, or national origin."

This state policy is of the utmost importance in the United States. Of course it cannot be fully implemented in a democracy where there is so much free-floating racial and ethnic prejudice. But the fact that public authorities take such stands, often in the face of public sentiment, is a remarkable fact. For the great crises of racial and ethnic persecution have occurred in all countries precisely when the government gave the green light. From the pogroms of Czarist Russia to the mass murder of Jews in Hitler Germany, the constant precondition was a favorable state policy. The government in power was following a policy of eliminating the minority or was at least allowing matters to take their own course without intervention. The importance of whether the state is on the side of racism or is against it is just as true in matters of discriminatory behavior as it is in pogroms and violence. In a democracy or a dictatorship the state can use law and the police to defend the rights of minorities or to abuse them. When by Federal or city ordinance or by industrial negotiation umpired by the state, a new and less prejudiced situation has become a fait accompli even those who protested most actively against it while it was under consideration tend to accept the arrangement and to become accustomed to it. Certainly in the United States it seems clear that more can be accomplished by these means toward ameliorating the job and housing discriminations than by any amount of work by good-will organizations.

This is not to say that informal, private, and nonlegislative efforts to improve social relations and eliminate prejudice are therefore unimportant. In a democracy laws and court decisions must have the backing of interested citizens, or they become dead letters. The ultimate goals of all who work for better race and ethnic relations can never be achieved merely by enforcing laws, which can forbid only the most blatant and overt acts of discrimination. No fiat has ever made any man over so that he can respect the human dignity of a Negro or a Jew if he has lived all his life in a community which acted on premises of white supremacy and anti-Semitism.

Any strategy for lessening our national shame of race and ethnic discrimination before the eyes of the rest of the world must therefore value interracial meetings of the women's auxiliaries of a Massachusetts town, and the We-Are-All-Americans pageants of a Middle Western city. But unless people who participate in such activities see to it that their efforts feed into a demand for Federal and state and city action they are guilty of bad tactics. For it is clear that the state can be used in America as an asset in their endeavours, and if they overlook this they are neglecting a major resource.

Such workers have often been too idealistic to join hands with politicians who want minority votes, but it is by such means that measures are put through in a democracy such as ours. If the powers that be are not moved to act for the good of the total community, perhaps they can be prevailed upon to court a substantial group of voters. And these voters may be able to press for enforcement also, thereby gaining first hand experience in the business of acting as American citizens.

I find it nothing less than remarkable that Benedict should have called attention more than thirty years ago to the fact that the most important force for the elimination of institutionalized racism in America was the United States Government. Perhaps this is obvious; but if it is, we all must be either disposed to forget it or to bury it beneath our catalogue of complaints about that same government. Heaven protect us from the good-will organizations—and I emphatically include here the elite private universities of our fair land, with their eloquent defenders of privilege—whose vaunted struggle against racism appears ultimately to hinge on the pressure, however feeble, to which they are subjected by governmental bodies. What seems, after all, to rise above the pronunciamentos, the indignant denials, and the litanies about quality are the triumphs of the United States Army, the United States Post Office, and the State Department—of all things!—in providing minority citizens with a fair opportunity to perform and to excel.

In 1943, Benedict and Gene Weltfish published the pamphlet entitled The Races of Mankind, a delightful item of popular education, to the fate of which an anecdote is attached. This pamphlet set forth a familiar position: it declared that races—insofar as one could speak of such categories in dealing with humankind—were equal in their potentialities. Mead writes that the pamphlet was denounced in Congress as subversive, "mainly because of a tactical error committed in the writing, in stating baldly that some Northern Negroes had scored higher in intelligence tests than had some Southern whites." In this instance, as in others, Benedict's view turns out to have been very militant for its time, and depressingly apposite today. Who among us has been more outspoken on the issue of racism than she; who has done as much to use his or her professional stature to impel our country toward social justice?

While I believe these materials exemplify Benedict's scientific and political posture in the postwar years, I am struck when I recall now, in the retrospect of three decades, some of the commonly held opinions of the time: that her views were retrograde, unscientific, even irrelevant. Such negative opinions had to do in part, I believe, with the "psychological" determinism she was thought to espouse, and with the lack of congruence between her theoretical positions and the evolutionary and materialist perspectives then in the process of rehabilitation at Columbia University. I am certainly as sure now as I was then that her critics, including some of my friends and classmates, were missing the point; though just as certainly I often found myself in disagreement with her views. No one sought to gainsay Benedict's position on race; but I suspect many persons thought that the belaboring of such views was superfluous. If so, then surely Benedict was right, and we who thought otherwise were wrong—not only was she right in what she thought, but also in her conviction that it had better be said, loudly, clearly, and repeatedly. She is, plainly, still right.

This brings me to another aspect of Benedict's scholarship to which I wish to refer: the studies of national cultures and national character for which she was famous. Her work in this regard is of special interest to me because I was both her student and Julian Steward's. Both of these scholars were interested in the anthropological analysis of large-scale, complex modern societies; their approaches were radically different. Steward's approach was very much in the ascendant in the mid-forties, Benedict's was not. With her death in 1948, research of the kind for which she had fought, and of which she herself was surely the most distinguished practitioner, went into a sort of eclipse. In spite of some work by Mead and others consistent with Benedict's approach, national character studies along the lines Benedict advocated have only grown rarer over the years.

The scientific promise of such research still needs to be evaluated. But my purpose here is rather to point to an aspect of the intellectual history of the time. Both Steward and Benedict were trained in the particularistic study of small-scale, non-Western societies, within some broad Boasian outlook. Though they took markedly different directions in their research, their interests overlapped, sometimes surprisingly. For instance, Steward's doctoral dissertation was on the ceremonial buffoon in native North America; while Benedict's paper on property rights in bilateral societies (1936) was published in the same year that Steward's paper on primitive bands appeared in the Kroeber Festschrift. Their interests intersected, in other words—perhaps even more, at times, than either of them recognized or acknowledged.

Both of these scholars moved from the study of small-scale societies toward the problems posed by big ones, at or about the same time—in the postwar years. Steward's view was ecological and stratificational, emphasizing the environment, the means and relations of production, the organization of institutions, and the role of class, among other features. Benedict's view was configurational, thematic, and value-oriented; differences in values and attitudes were expected to occur both within and between sectors of the same society, but underlying, generally shared understandings were also thought to typify the society at large.

This is not the place to attempt to evaluate or compare these two radically different approaches. But it does seem appropriate—particularly since they have often been seen as mutually exclusive theoretically—to stress that some scholars have benefited from both views, and that time has left the similarity of intentions of Benedict and Steward honestly revealed. Both wished to transfer interpretive procedures from small, relatively homogeneous societies to large, class-divided societies. Both believed such societies might be analyzable in terms of fundamental value orientations. Both were interested in the practical or policy implications of their findings. To note these similarities does not diminish in any way the very important differences, both methodological and theoretical, between the Steward and Benedict approaches—nor should it.

But neither should the differences obscure similarities of intent, or of their aspirations for the future of the profession. The critics of Benedict and the critics of Steward were usually of different sorts; but often they espoused a kind of anthropology equidistant from the work of both of these scholars. On the one hand, Steward was ostensibly not (or no longer) interested in the real subject matter of anthropology (which is to say, "primitives"); and his interests showed a discomfiting concern with what was happening in the real world. On the other, Benedict similarly had supposedly lost her interest in so-called primitive peoples, and had become attracted by real-life problems. Worse, she thought peoples had underlying values or orientations that might not be explainable either by class or by ecology—thus managing to be heretical in even more ways than Steward. Though Steward's students continued to work along the lines he had developed—and, of course, he survived Benedict by more than two decades—other anthropologies became the wave of the future in the 1960s and 1970s. Neither Benedictian configurationism nor Stewardian ecology would lead the way in those decades, when it was becoming clear to some that the New Ethnography would soon solve all important anthropological problems. Boas and Benedict were not the only optimists, it seems. Today, it may still be worth-while to touch anew on Benedict's approach to the study of national cultures.

In that work, Benedict revivified concepts she had developed in the study of technically simpler societies, and gave them new meanings: the idea of coherence within one culture; the presence of some dominant strain or theme as the expression of that coherence; and the relationship between cultural "givens" and the culturally constrained evolution of personality. Readers of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword are unanimous in the opinion that this is Benedict's crowning achievement in the study of national cultures. There have been innumerable criticisms; but in the light of the methods Benedict had to employ to write the book, few scholars would gainsay the penetrating originality of her analysis. In the years following the publication of that book, Benedict continued to work on national cultures, and provided many graduate students and colleagues with the opportunity to join her in the research.

A short presentation to the New York Academy of Sciences, made the same year as the publication of Chrysanthemum, provides as clear a statement as any of her research aims at the time. In it, she discusses the problems posed by a plentitude of information ("Vast quantities of material are a handicap only when the crucial problems to be investigated are not formulated"); the lack of homogeneity in modern nations ("The conditions do not mean that investigation must be abandoned. The solution is to multiply the number of investigations"); and class differentiation ("The trained anthropologist… has to present both parties as actors in a patterned situation. He can see it as a kind of see-saw, and by studying the height of the fulcrum and the length of the board [in the study of classes, laws about property and land, general conditions of social security, and the like], he can show either that the group on the high end of the see-saw is necessarily very far up and the group on the low end very far down, or that they are more nearly balanced"). Most important, it seems to me now, was Benedict's insistence on the study of culture as a way to explain. This may seem obvious to a new generation of scholars; but it is historically interesting to observe how many decades it has taken some of us to discover that understanding class does not obviate the study of culture, and that culture is not reducible to class, when all is said and done.

Her view of the values of a culture as underlying its surface manifestations, resonating in different institutions and providing thematic unity to overt diversity, has been criticized and defended with equivalent zeal. It seems to me that nothing is likely to convince the skeptics; in my own case, I have always been uncertain how Benedict's hypotheses might be tested. But her attempts to distill the value essence of a social group by identifying some core of beliefs, then to show us how those beliefs serve as the mortar of the cultural edifice, impress me all the same with their daring and penetration. I have been unable to find any citation for a remark she once made in passing about the relations between conquering and conquered peoples in the history of European imperialism. She said that she thought the English had always done well with martial and bellicose subjects, like the Masai, the Sikhs, the Maori, the Gurkhas, etc., while the Dutch had always done well with submissive subjects—while neither had ruled wisely those of opposing temperaments. I recall being struck by the observation (without being certain either that it was true or that it could be tested). What impressed me was that it seemed like a way of summing up a very great deal swiftly and neatly—and that it touched on a very important issue, one I had never heard or read a scholar observe upon before. Benedict's unusual gift of providing highly original cameo accounts of this sort, as well as her extraordinary sense of humor—the sense of humor of a great lady—were revealed to me first in her classes, and again in the teacher-student conferences I was privileged to have with her. But perhaps I will be excused for mentioning how I came to be a student of Benedict's.

My first encounter with her in the fall of 1946 was part of my own search for a profession or occupation that would feel worth doing. One has the impression that similar searches have become popular again—or, at least, that they were for a while following the end of the Vietnam War. Like so many of my classmates, recently discharged from the armed forces, I was seeking with some bewilderment a career having "something to do with" the study of society. I cannot now remember who first suggested to me that I attend a lecture by Benedict; but I remember the lecture well. She was describing the organization of several societies by means of analogies, and I recall her employing "hourglass" and "siphon" designs to dramatize indigenous structures of power for the collection and distribution of valuables. She talked about the kula and about potlatch—new words for me. (It was a year or two later before the precise images came back to mind, this being when I first heard a lecture by Karl Polanyi.) Benedict stood before us, tall, spare, seeming rather distant, her voice startlingly low and slightly hoarse, plainly dressed, her silver hair short and severe, what I judged to be her shyness heightened by the contrast between the penetration of her ideas and the somewhat absent gaze with which she regarded us. I was astonished by her, and by her lecture. It simply had never occurred to me before that a total culture might be looked upon as if it were a work of art, something to be coolly contemplated, something utterly unique and distinctive, yet available to be studied, analyzed, understood. That any teacher at that time in my life could have impelled me to think of Keats—when I had not so much as looked at a poem in five years—was wonder enough for me. I decided to become an anthropologist because I heard Ruth Benedict give a lecture. And that is about as close to the truth of it as I can come.

Benedict first asked to see me after I had written a short paper for her, comparing the Passover seder as it had been observed by my grandfather, my parents, and my siblings. I remember clearly sitting nervously before her, while she explained that she had enjoyed the paper. I made an inane remark about having wanted to make the paper less literary, and more scientific. She smiled and said only: "Oh, I have no objection to good writing!" I was, of course, grateful and very flattered. In the course of the subsequent year-and-a-half, I attended courses given by Benedict, received her advice, and was employed by her in her Research in Contemporary Cultures project. One of the sturdiest memories I have of those times is of her complete evenhandedness with her male and female students, even though we returning male veterans were quite thoughtlessly shouldering out of the way our female contemporaries. While there was—as I remember it—an anti-female bias among many of my male classmates that extended itself to Benedict, it was not reciprocated. Throughout, I recall Benedict as serene, generous and courteous—more so, certainly, than she needed to be.

I have been asked several times whether I can specify how Benedict's anthropology affected my own work, and I have been at a loss to answer, mainly because I never tried seriously to think about it. I think I know the answer now, at least in one particular regard.

In 1948, when Benedict died, I was in Puerto Rico as a member of a graduate student group which, under Julian Steward's direction and John Murra's supervision, was at work on the project Steward had initiated there. I had studied with Benedict in the period 1946-48; but my interest in Steward's perspective and the chance to do fieldwork abroad had led me away from Benedict's research. By the time that I had returned from the field and wrote my dissertation, I had begun to do a kind of anthropology that was heavily historical, with particular emphasis on the economic history of the plantation system, and the evolution of forms of labor. That emphasis emerged when I studied the Puerto Rican south coast community I had chosen in early 1948; in subsequent years, I became a Caribbean specialist.

In the summer of 1953, I returned to Puerto Rico to start a new fieldwork project, this time entirely on my own. My aim then was to record a single life history, but that of a person from the community I thought I already knew fairly well. I did not realize at the time—though I certainly do, now—how much my interest and my theoretical aims had been influenced, partly by my undergraduate training in psychology, but considerably more by the training I had received from Benedict. In her sensitive analytic movement from cultural standard to individual response and back again, Benedict made us aware of the dominant place of culture in the profile of the individual; but she never portrayed culture—nor, I believe, conceived of it—as some impersonal monster, some bloodless computer, "encoding" us, or pouring us into rigid molds. Because I knew Taso, my chief informant, well, long before our work on the life history began; because I spoke his language comfortably (if not fluently); because I knew his family, friends and neighbors, their work, the place they lived, and a fair amount about its past—for these and other reasons, I hoped that the life history we prepared together would be of a piece with the study of the community that had preceded it. That, at least, was my aim. My search for congruence, though, was not a search for harmony. Benedict's work makes clear that while individuals are certainly "products" of their cultures, they cannot take on their characteristically distinctive identity, while growing up, without strain and suffering. The relationship between culture and individual, then, is neither straightforward nor simple, and Benedict's nuanced view of how cultures work, in and through persons, had surely affected me profoundly. But while I worked with Taso, I had only the dimmest notion of the ways my teacher, the person who had by her words decided me to try to become an anthropologist, had given shape to my ideas, and inspired me to try to test them, years after her passing.

One of Benedict's last published works was her presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, "Anthropology and the Humanities." She argues here that anthropology, more than any other of the socalled "social sciences," stands at the boundary between science and the humanities, deems this not only proper but necessary, calls her own view "heretical," and concludes: " … once anthropologists include the mind of man in their subject matter, the methods of science and the methods of the humanities complement each other. Any commitment to methods which exclude either approach is self-defeating." In this late paper, Benedict waxes particularly eloquent on the illumination provided by fieldwork. She points out that "the humanities… were an intense crosscultural experience … their aims were often couched in the same phrases as those of modern anthropological investigation of an alien culture." She argues that "the mind of man… man's emotions, his rationalizations, his symbolic structures" are commonly included in American anthropology's definitions of culture—and that this inclusion makes of the humanities anthropology's greatest resource. Her plea is emphatically not an attack on science; though it is perhaps worth mentioning that her science was much damned by some colleagues in the final years of her career as being "no more than" art.

Rereading her presidential address recently, I thought back to the life history I had attempted to record and to fit within what I understood of the history of a community, a region and a class. "For more than a decade," Benedict had written:

anthropologists have agreed upon the value of the life history. Some have said that it was the essential tool in the study of a culture. Many life histories have been collected—many more have been published. Very little, however, has been done even with those which are published, and field workers who collected them have most often merely extracted in their topical monographs bits about marriage or ceremonies or livelihood which they obtained in life histories. The nature of the life history material made this largely inevitable, for I think anyone who has read great numbers of these autobiographies, published and unpublished, will agree that from eighty to ninety-five per cent of most of them are straight ethnographic reporting of culture. It is a time-consuming and repetitious way of obtaining straight ethnography, and if that is all they are to be used for, any field worker knows how to obtain such data more economically. The unique value of life histories lies in that fraction of the material which shows what repercussions the experiences of a man's life—either shared or idiosyncratic—have upon him as a human being molded in that environment. Such information, as it were, tests out a culture by showing its workings in the life of a carrier of that culture; we can watch in an individual case, in Bradley's words, "what is, seeing that so it happened and must have happened."

Benedict makes her point again—what she calls "the common ground which is shared by the humanities and by anthropology as soon as it includes the mind and behavior of men in its definition of culture." "But if we are to make our collected life histories count in anthropological theory and understanding," she writes:

we have only one recourse: we must be willing and able to study them according to the best tradition of the humanities. None of the social sciences, not even psychology, has adequate models for such studies. The humanities have. If we are to use life histories for more than items of topical ethnology, we shall have to be willing to do the kind of job on them which has traditionally been done by the great humanists.

But this important plea for anthropology's crossroads does not forget what anthropology itself has to offer. In a prophetic reference, Benedict tells us:

Only with a knowledge of what the current ideas were about ghosts and their communications with their descendants can one judge what Shakespeare was saying in Hamlet; one can understand Hamlet's relations with his mother only with an acquaintance with what incest was in Elizabethan times, and what it meant to contract "an o'erhasty marriage" where "funeral baked meats did coldly furnish the marriage tables".

It seems to me that Benedict's insights here about the relation between culture and individual were lessons I had begun to learn from her at an earlier time, quite without realizing it. What Geertz has referred to as "Zola's maxim that character is culture seen through a temperament" is a maxim that was well understood by Benedict, and one she sought repeatedly to teach.

In the three decades since her death, Ruth Benedict and her work have been overshadowed to some extent by the enormous proliferation of anthropologies and anthropologists. I believe that what she offered us, however, is still fresh and penetrating, for those of us willing to contemplate it. That she gloried in diversity seems less and less quaint, in a world the sameness of which grows ever grayer. That she underlined our common humanity seems less and less academic, in a world still so unsure of what makes us human, or whether we are unique. That she wanted an anthropology of modern life made her a pioneer of our profession. That she wanted social justice for all Americans, without regard to gender or race, makes her as modern as our times.