SOURCE: "Ruth Benedict: Apollonian and Dionysian," The University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, April, 1949, pp. 241-53.

[Barnouw is an American anthropologist and fiction writer. In the following essay, he provides an analysis of the underlying principles of Patterns of Culture.]

"The Chippewa can not kill thefatherr' Ruth Benedict exclaimed to me one day, looking up gravely from my much blue-pencilled thesis and emphasizing each word separately. "They can not kill the father! Contrast with Eskimo!" My adviser turned her meditative eyes upon me and inquired, "Can't you fit that in somewhere?" As often happened, I felt that I almost saw her point, but not quite. However, I jotted a hurried note—"Chips don't kill father.… Esk.(?)"—and said that I would have to think about it.

Like most of Ruth Benedict's students, I looked up to her with a mixture of veneration and bewilderment. With her silvery aura of prestige, dignity, and charm, she seemed to be like a symbolic representative of the humanistic values of the Renaissance. Yet Ruth Benedict often seemed to have a kind of private language and way of thinking which made communication uncertain. She used unexpected verbal short-cuts, tangential observations, and symbols to convey her meaning; but these stratagems did not always succeed. In this particular case, I debated with myself for several days about her cryptic suggestion. Finally, I decided to insert a foot-note to the effect that while the Eskimos frequently killed their aged or incapacitated parents, the Chippewa had not resorted to this custom, although both groups were nomadic hunters who moved through an inhospitable environment in which care for the aged was difficult. Perhaps, I suggested, the Chippewa respected parental authority too much to be able to commit patricide. It is possible that I did not put my heart into that footnote. At any rate, when Dr. Benedict came to re-read the manuscript, she deleted it with a dubious shake of the head, remarking that the idea was not convincing—and I did not contest the point.

Ruth Benedict sometimes had a way of talking about "primitive" peoples as if she could see an x-ray of their souls projected upon an invisible screen before her. "The Blackfeet always dance on a knife-edge," she would announce, as if seeing them there, balancing precariously along the blade. Then she would turn to her visitor with a charming smile. "You know," she would add with a nod of the head, implying that her consultant could also see the vision. This implicit confidence ushered the dazed neophyte into the company of Boas and the immortals. "The Pima like slow intoxication. That fits in perfectly with all of the rest about them, doesn't it? You know." One nodded, smiled, and tried hard to remember the information. ("Will they have that on the exams?") But perhaps Dr. Benedict assumed that her students had made their way through the same vast body of literature that she had read and come to the same vivid and original conclusions.

Ruth Benedict was thirty-two when she began to study anthropology—"to have something really to do," as she put it. Before then she had taught English in a girls' school and had written a great deal of poetry published under the name of Anne Singleton. Her devotion to poetry persisted through Ruth Benedict's later years. Even in the scholarly papers which began to appear in the nineteen-twenties when she was thoroughly steeped in the austere, almost military, intellectual discipline of Franz Boas, there was always some lyrical awareness of balance and phrase which went far above and beyond the normal call of academic duty.

Ruth Benedict also looked very like a tall and slender Platonic ideal of a poetess. The students who could not understand her lectures were at least able to derive something from the opportunity of looking at her. Her dreamily gazing eyes under the dark brows were most extraordinary, like the hooded grey eyes of an aristocratic eagle. In her face and manner there appeared to be a subtle blend of will and of trancelike reflection. She had an other-worldly look about her; yet she was resolute about the matters of this world. I used to feel that there were two sides to her complex character which were never completely fused. On the one hand, let us say, there was Anne Singleton, the Dionysian dreamer; and on the other hand there was Dr. Benedict, the disciplined Apollonian scholar. In one and the same individual there was an apparent juxtaposition of Sappho and Franz Boas, the chrysanthemum and the sword.

Archaeologically speaking, the earlier layer in this combination must have been Anne Singleton, who wrote lyrics about passion, love, and death, and lines like these:

               Only those
Storm driven down the dark, see light arise,
Her body broken for their rainbow bread,
At late and shipwrecked close.

Anne Singleton, we may imagine, was youthfully responsive to the world of nature—mystical and Dionysian. Boas was a later force, an incarnation of will, discipline, and rationality. Call him an introjected "father figure," "animus," or what you will; his personal inspiration stamped the last thirty years of her life. On the walls of Ruth Benedict's office hung two framed photographs, one of a leathery old Blackfoot chieftain and one of Boas, two gnarled and weather-beaten old men who had evidently suffered and endured. It was Boas, one of the intellectual leaders of our time, who caught her loyalty, altered the direction of her life, and gave her "something really to do." His logic tempered her poetic intuition, which she evidently felt some need to chasten. 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 perhaps 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. This book was originally a patchwork of separate articles and field studies, ingeniously stitched together into a more or less integrated whole and given force and dignity by a warm imagination and turn of phrase. In its pages Anne Singleton and Dr. Benedict came together and pooled their talents. The Dionysian poet and the Apollonian scholar were reconciled. This may explain the faults of the book; it also explains its charm. For, recently incarnated in a thirty-five cent Pelican edition, Patterns of Culture has become one of the most widely read medium-heavy books in the whole field of social science. In the next few pages we shall examine some of its doctrines.

One basic assertion in this treatise is to the effect that some human societies—not necessarily all—are characterized by a group ethos which is analogous to the personality of an individual, and that the essential values characteristic of a culture exert a selective influence upon all of the responses of the society to historical events. This idea was once stated with particular brilliance by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, a book which greatly influenced Ruth Benedict. In his orchestral style, Spengler proclaimed that societies were guided by different metaphysical conceptions and that characteristic attitudes towards space and time were imbedded in every major facet of a particular culture. Scornful at his feeble contemporaries for having missed this discovery, Spengler exclaimed in a typical passage: "Who amongst them realizes that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean geometry, between the spaceperspective of Western oil-painting and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities?"

Because of some guiding metaphysical attitudes, then, a given society is likely to reject any cultural innovations which appear to be out of harmony with its dominant Weltanschauung. Thus, the ancient Greeks, according to Spengler, were acquainted with the chronology and almanac-reckoning of the Babylonians and the Egyptians, but this did not alter their "shallow" conception of time. Spengler pointed out that neither Plato nor Aristotle had an observatory, and that, in "an act of the deepest symbolic significance," Pericles passed a decree directed against people who propagated astronomical theories. Moreover, according to Spengler, the Greeks had no sense of history. Even Thucydides claimed that before his time no events of importance had occurred in the world. Spengler contrasted the Greeks with the Egyptians in this respect. Egyptian culture was an embodiment of care, expressed in the use of granite and chiselled archives, in the elaborate administrative system and irrigation projects. Care for the past was expressed in chronological records and in the custom of mummification. But the a-historical Greeks burned their dead.

Spengler was one of the first theoreticians to deal with the problems of selective borrowing under acculturation and to turn for their solution to culture-and-personality characteristics rather than to economic or geographical determinants. Spengler also showed that borrowed items of culture usually undergo some kind of transformation in the new setting and are tailored to fit the culture into which they have been introduced. The rejections and refashionings which take place may be cited as evidence for the existence of a dominant attitude characteristic of the culture, if the same principle seems to be involved in each separate response to diffusion.

After she had absorbed this wisdom from Spengler, Ruth Benedict turned to the cultures of the south-western United States to see whether these groups were characterized by any guiding principles of this nature, and whether such central tendencies could explain the rejection, acceptance, or remodelling of diffused cultural items. In this area Dr. Benedict already had a predecessor. As early as 1916, H. K. Haeberlin had written a penetrating article which foreshadowed some of the themes in Patterns of Culture. Haeberlin pointed out that many religious ceremonies and other aspects of culture could be found common to both the Hopi and Navajo, but that there were differences of emphasis in these societies. A ceremony designed to heal the sick among the Navajo was directed toward securing fertility for the fields among the Pueblo Indians. A game associated with the buffalo among the Plains tribes was associated with crops among the Hopi. Haeberlin explained this local refashioning as due to a psychological orientation. In the case of the Pueblo Indians this orientation could be designated under the heuristic catchword of "the idea of fertilization."

The integrating factor which Haeberlin therefore isolated as the ruling motivation in Pueblo culture was "the idea of fertilization." Ruth Benedict, following a similar line of thought, found a different focus of integration, and a different catchword or set of catchwords.

The basic contrast between the Pueblos and the other cultures of North America is the contrast that is named and described by Nietzsche in his studies of Greek tragedy. He discusses two diametrically opposed ways of arriving at the values of existence. The Dionysian pursues them through "the annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence"; he seeks to attain in his most valued moments escape from the boundaries imposed upon him by his five senses, to break through into another order of experience. The desire of the Dionysian, in personal experience or in ritual, is to press through it toward a certain psychological state, to achieve excess. The closest analogy to the emotions he seeks is drunkenness, and he values the illuminations of frenzy. With Blake, he believes "the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." The Apollonian distrusts all this, and has often little idea of the nature of such experiences. He finds means to outlaw them from his conscious life. He "knows but one law, measure in the Hellenic sense." He keeps the middle of the road, stays within the known map, does not meddle with disruptive psychological states. In Nietzsche's fine phrase, even in the exaltation of the dance he "remains what he is, and retains his civic name." …

It is not possible to understand Pueblo attitudes towards life without some knowledge of the culture from which they have detached themselves: that of the rest of North America. It is by the force of the contrast that we can calculate the strength of their opposite drive and the resistances that have kept out of the Pueblos the most characteristic traits of the American aborigines. For the American Indians as a whole, and including those of Mexico, were passionately Dionysian. They valued all violent experience, all means by which human beings may break through the usual sensory routine, and to all such experiences they attributed the highest value.

Ruth Benedict then provided illustrations of this wide-spread Dionysian tendency, such as fasting and selftorture in the vision quest and the ceremonial use of drugs, peyote, and alcohol to induce religious intoxication. These patterns were uniformly rejected by the Pueblo Indians, she explained, because they ran counter to the Apollonian values cherished by the people. The Hopi and Zuni had never brewed intoxicants or accepted drugs, although they were surrounded by Indian groups who did. Drinking was consequently no problem on Pueblo reservations. Selftorture was also incomprehensible to the Pueblos; and while whipping took place during the puberty ceremonies, this ordeal was merely a symbolic beating which drew no blood.

In a similar vein Dr. Benedict went on to delineate the rejection of the "Dionysian" Ghost Dance of the Great Plains, the shamanistic trance, the tradition of boasting, and other un-Apollonian patterns, such as: competition for prestige, punishment for adultery, frenzied lamentation at funerals, recourse to suicide, sense of sin, and dualism in cosmology.

This long list of items, so persuasively tied together, is cumulatively impressive and appears to be not only more convincing than Spengler's weird but stimulating linkage of bank-books and perspective in art, but also more exhaustive in its scope than Haeberlin's pioneer analysis of Pueblo culture. However, there are some dubious assertions in this original presentation for which proof would be difficult to secure. In particular, it is hard to accept her statement that "the American Indians as a whole, and including those of Mexico, were passionately Dionysian." This would presumably link together such varied cultures as the hunting bands of Labrador, the fishing communities of the North-West Coast, the caste societies of southeastern North America, and the complex civilization of the Aztecs. In labelling them all "Dionysian" Dr. Benedict commits the very error for which she castigates the arm-chair anthropologists of the nineteenth century, who made facile generalizations about "primitives" and who failed to recognize the tremendous diversity of pre-literate cultures. Writers like Frazer, Dr. Benedict tells us, ignore all the aspects of cultural integration. "Mating or death practices are illustrated by bits of behaviour selected indiscriminately from the most different cultures, and the discussion builds up a kind of mechanical Frankenstein's monster with a right eye from Fiji, a left from Europe, one leg from Tierra del Fuego, and one from Tahiti, and all the fingers and toes from still different regions. Such a figure corresponds to no reality in the past or present.…"

Now, how does this erroneous procedure differ from that pursued by Dr. Benedict? To demonstrate the "Dionysian" bent of the American Indians, she selects a pierced tongue from Mexico, a chopped-off finger from the Plains, and a bitten-off nose from the Apache. These she somehow pieces together to suggest the ethos of "the culture from which they [the Pueblos] have detached themselves." Boas must have demurred at this heresy on the part of his favourite disciple.

A critic may also dissent from some of the specific items which illustrate the "Apollonian" nature of Pueblo culture. Drinking, for example, is probably not so rare, and initiation whippings are not so mild in Pueblo culture, to judge from some observations of other ethnologists. One trustworthy eye-witness described the floggings as being "very severe" and added that "pandemonium reigns in the kiva during this exciting half-hour"—which doesn't sound Apollonian. Sun Chief, who wrote his autobiography, confessed that he suffered permanent scars as the result of his initiation. We might question whether the Hopi snake dance is not more Dionysian than Dr. Benedict would have us believe; and perhaps the widespread Pueblo fear of witchcraft is indicative of a greater degree of conflict and tension than the amiable picture which can be derived from Patterns of Culture.

One difficulty with the constructs utilized by Ruth Benedict seems to be that "Apollonian" peoples are not always as consistently Apollonian as they should be. Certainly, "Dionysian" peoples are not always Dionysian. Could a society exist in which everybody was engaged in pursuing ecstatic experiences, cutting off fingers, taking dope or hashish, getting drunk, and going into trances? Of course not. Some Apollonian core of sobriety and responsibility must be found in any culture, or else it will fall apart. At the same time, Dionysian elements can usually be discovered in any culture, no matter how "middle of the road" it may be. To be sure, one might still attempt to grade cultures and arrange them along an Apollonian-Dionysian continuum, but I should not like to try it. What are we in the United States, Apollonian or Dionysian? Is there an answer? I don't know. Perhaps most of us are Apollonian during the week and become more or less Dionysian from Saturday night to Monday morning, if Aldous Huxley is correct in his opinion that the average man's life alternates between senseless week-day routine and senseless weekend orgy.

In view of these difficulties, how are we to characterize forms of integration which exist outside of the Apollonian-Dionysian polarity? Should we have to find a new catchword for each culture (Babbittian? Confucian? Nanookian?) with each label representing a different principle of integration? Obviously, this is an unsatisfactory stratagem, as Dr. Benedict admitted in an almost selfdisparaging paragraph: "It would be absurd to cut every culture down to the Procrustean bed of some catchword characterization. The danger of lopping off important facts that do not illustrate the main proposition is grave enough even at best.… We do not need a plank of configuration written into the platform of an ethnological school." Here she sounds more like Boas than like Spengler.

One important problem which Dr. Benedict did not pursue in Patterns of Culture concerns the means by which individuals are "Apollonianized." In other words, how do the Hopi manage to become such submissive, gentle people? And how were "Dionysian" attitudes cultivated among the Blackfeet in each new generation? In this book Ruth Benedict seemed to assume that the whole thing works by contagion. Thus, an individual born into an "Apollonian" culture and exposed to it long enough automatically becomes an "Apollonian" person, just as an Eskimo baby naturally learns to speak Eskimo rather than another language and eventually "takes over" Eskimo culture. But psychoanalysts and child psychologists would not consider such an answer satisfactory. They would like to know more specifically what typical childhood experiences condition the growing personality in this particular culture, leading to an Apollonian repression of hostile impulses, let us say. For if personality is formed to so large an extent in the earliest years of life, as these specialists assure us, one should know something about child-rearing patterns in such a society in order to determine how Apollonian mildness is actually cultivated. These psychodynamic problems were not Ruth Benedict's concern in Patterns of Culture any more than they were Spengler's concern in The Decline of the West. To be sure, there is a passing reference to the probable absence of the Oedipus complex among the Zuni, but beyond this there is little evidence of psychoanalytic orientation. In her later work, however, Dr. Benedict paid a greater degree of attention to childhood experiences and their relationship to adult personality.

It is interesting that in the meantime Dr. Benedict's work was instrumental in furthering the formation of a new school of psychoanalytic thought. Karen Horney paid her respects to the anthropologists (including Dr. Benedict) in The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, asserting that cultural factors had been understressed by Freud in his studies of the etiology of neuroses. Accordingly, Dr. Horney emphasized cultural conditions at the expense of the orthodox libidinal drives and infantile experiences.

In the course of her remarks Karen Horney touched on Ruth Benedict's Apollonian-Dionysian duality, describing the Dionysian tendency as a desire to lose the self.

In our culture we are more aware of the opposite attitude toward the self, the attitude that emphasizes and highly values the particularities and uniqueness of individuality. Man in our culture feels strongly that his own self is a separate unity, distinguished from or opposite to the world outside. Not only does he insist on this individuality but he derives a great deal of satisfaction from it; he finds happiness in developing his special potentialities, mastering himself and the world in active conquest, being constructive and doing creative work.…

But the opposite tendency that we have discussed—the tendency to break through the shell of individuality and be rid of its limitations and isolation—is an equally deep-rooted human attitude, and is also pregnant with potential satisfaction. Neither of these tendencies is in itself pathological; both the preservation and development of individuality and the sacrifice of individuality are legitimate goals in the solution of human problems.

This seems like a curious conclusion. But perhaps it is in keeping with the Spengler-Benedict tradition of cultural relativism. For after all, one cannot pass value-judgments (can one?) upon the incommensurable metaphysical assumptions and attitudes which underlie the destinies of cultures. Which is "better"—to be Apollonian or Dionysian?—or (to use Spengler's terms) to be Classical, Magian, or Faustian? But this is like asking: Is it better to be an oak-tree or a cow, a star-fish or Senator Vandenberg? There may be an answer, but one hardly knows where to begin.

Yet, there is a catch in this relativist position, at least for "reformers" like Benedict and Homey. Spengler was more consistent in his Olympian view, jeering sarcastically at "world-improvers" from his privileged position beyond space and time. But Ruth Benedict, whose books and pamphlets urgently combated racial prejudice, was a "world-improver" caught up in the issues of her day, passing value-judgments right and left upon the culture of her world. As for Karen Homey, it would seem that a psychoanalyst would also be debarred from a relativist position. The profession of psychoanalysis, which aims to "cure," assumes that there is some standard of emotional health which "neurotics" and "psychotics" do not meet. To be sure, in the wake of Benedict's book, much attention was paid to the variety in cultural standards of "normality." People were fond of pointing out, as Ruth Benedict had done, that trances or transvestism were accepted in other cultures, that therefore our ideas about normality were "ethnocentric," and that perhaps the only adequate concept of normality would have to be a statistical one based upon a particular society and carrying no cross-cultural implications. But this attitude is no longer so prevalent. A headache, after all, is a headache in any culture; a stomach ache is a stomach ache. People may eat different things, and a stomach ache may be brought about by a variety of causes; but all the same, some adequate cause-andeffect relations (transcending cultural differences) may be discovered which will account for, and perhaps cure, the stomach ache of a Hopi as well as the stomach ache of a New York business man. If this is feasible, why may not a psychosis be labelled a psychosis in any culture? Is it not possible that universally valid standards of human functioning are discoverable and that basic psychodynamic principles do not differ very much from one society to another?

Moreover, can we not say that in some societies people seem to be "happier" than in others, or that there are fewer mental and emotional disturbances in society A than in society B? From reading Patterns of Culture, at least, one receives the very definite impression that the Pueblo tribes are "happier" than the Dobu. "Life in Dobu fosters extreme forms of animosity and malignancy which most societies have minimized by their institutions," Dr. Benedict tells us; while Pueblo culture is described as "a civilization whose forms are dictated by the typical choices of the Apollonian, all of whose delight is in formality and whose way of life is the way of measure and sobriety."

Now, in which society would you rather live? Or does it make no difference? I am sure that Ruth Benedict would much rather be a Zuni than a Dobu or Kwakiutl. Yet in the final paragraph of her book she speaks of the "coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence." At the same time, at other points in Patterns of Culture, she seems to approach absolute criteria for the evaluation of social systems. "It is possible," she suggests, "to scrutinize different institutions and cast up their cost in terms of social capital, in terms of the less desirable behaviour traits they stimulate, and in terms of human suffering and frustration." Here is an approach which can unite the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychiatry, and one, moreover, which may also justify the activities of the liberal "world-improver." Yet Ruth Benedict was not consistent in this approach.

Elgin Williams has discussed the internal contradictions and inconsistencies in Ruth Benedict's work. "Formally she sticks to relativism," he observes. "Her pragmatism is not so much at the tip of her tongue as bred in the bone. Try as she may to maintain the pose of relativism, the test of consequences intrudes." He is aware of the fact that Dr. Benedict's concern for tolerance was expressed in her cultural relativism, but he inquires whether this relativism, if carried to a logical conclusion, would not lead to an acceptance of Jim Crow in the south and other manifestations of intolerance. These are stubborn old problems which may be phrased in a hundred different ways. Consider, for example, the Zuni and Apache, who of course have "equally valid patterns of life." Among these patterns the Zuni and Apache have remarkably contrasting solutions for the problem of adultery. In Zuni culture, the woman is not punished in any way, while among the Apache the injured husband bites off the end of his wife's nose. From an anthropological point of view, both patterns "function" successfully in their respective cultures. The one response is "Apollonian," the other "Dionysian." But is that all that we can say about them?

It seems to me that in a case like this, constructs such as "Apollonian" or "Dionysian" may obscure rather than enlighten the issue. Granted that group differences in "basic personality structure" and in culturally accepted values do exist, these do not in any way negate the essential psychic unity of mankind. An individual Hopi has a host of life-problems in common with an individual Apache, or Kwakiutl, or Dobu, however different may be the value-systems and metaphysical assumptions which underlie these cultures. Surely, some solutions to basic problems are more satisfactory than others. Very likely the Apache were happy to surrender their nose-biting practices, even if it meant giving up an important outlet for their Dionysian tendencies.

However, there is one optimistic aspect in Ruth Benedict's view of culture, which should be congenial to the assumptions of a "world-improver." I refer to the absence of any cyclical fatalism like that of Spengler, or of any constitutional determinism like that of Sheldon. Nor does Dr. Benedict accept the philosophy of predestination that we find in the work of Kardiner, with its apparent assumption that adult life consists mainly of the working out of conflicts originating during infancy in response to childhood disciplines. The only determinism which Ruth Benedict stresses is a cultural determinism, but with the saving implication that man may develop some cultureconsciousness and insight into the mould of his own culture and thereby change or transcend it in some way. Ruth Benedict always stressed the extraordinary plasticity of man and the great diversity of his culture. To her, culture was a "superorganic" medium which was presumably linked by only the slenderest threads to its organic substratum. According to this viewpoint, man has great potential freedom. But this free will does not seem to be particularly significant in a relativist framework, wherein whatever man does is equivalent. In this view, man is all dressed up with no place (or a thousand places) to go.

In the preceding pages we have examined some aspects of Patterns of Culture. I have not attempted to deal with all of its sections, but mainly with the most challenging and original themes. The chapter on Dobu, to my mind, is an unfortunate inclusion because it is based entirely upon the work of one ethnologist who spent only six months among these islanders. Later, in the course of her official work in Washington during the war, Dr. Benedict made similar reconstructions on the basis of equally meagre evidence. To be sure, she had the excuse of war-time pressures and limitations; but all the same it seems rather rash, for example, to write a book about Japanese history, culture, and personality without ever having been to Japan, and after having interviewed only a few acculturated Japanese.

Our reflections about Patterns of Culture now lead us to two final questions. First of all, why did Ruth Benedict, who worked in close association with the highly critical Boas, develop a theme as questionable as her ApollonianDionysian duality appears to be? Secondly, what was Ruth Benedict's positive contribution to social science?

As to the first question, the answer lies partly in the fact that Dr. Benedict was exploring new territory and that her errors (if we can call them such) were those of a pioneer. But granted that this is so, why did Dr. Benedict elect the particular theme she chose for elaboration? Why, in spite of the flimsy evidence for such an assertion, did she insist upon branding all non-Pueblo Indians as "Dionysian"? If Dr. Benedict was a scholar (and she was), why did her scholarship turn soft at this particular point? What I am suggesting through these questions is that irrational factors may have helped to dictate Ruth Benedict's choice of theme. Let us take a leaf from Dr. Benedict's work and inquire into the factors behind her "selective borrowing" from The Birth of Tragedy.

Nietzsche's vague and chaotically rolling passages do not excite the imagination of every reader. If they did in Ruth Benedict's case, there must have been some tension within her own psyche which corresponded to the ApollonianDionysian conflict which Nietzsche described. This tension, whatever its source, seems to be particularly characteristic of Western culture and finds expression in various other terminologies, such as the conflict between classicism and romanticism, reason and emotion, bourgeois and bohemian, form and colour, ego and id. This internal conflict must have been particularly intense in the case of Nietzsche, for otherwise he would never have "discovered" the Apollonian-Dionysian antithesis among the ancient Greeks. My suggestion is that the same principle may be applicable to Ruth Benedict, and that in her case two conflicting tendencies were seeking some kind of integration. In her earlier years an integration was achieved under the aegis of the Dionysian Anne Singleton; in her later years under that of the Apollonian Dr. Benedict.

Perhaps it was some such inner duality which made Ruth Benedict so responsive to Nietzsche's nebulous dichotomy and led her to discover its manifestations among the cultures of aboriginal North America. As we have seen (in the case of Haeberlin), other guiding motivations besides the Apollonian can be deduced from a contrast of Pueblo with non-Pueblo cultures; so that Dr. Benedict's characterization is not the only and inevitable one. I am not suggesting that reason and deduction played no role in the application of Nietzsche's antithesis to Pueblo culture; but I do think it possible that irrational factors and "projection" were involved to some extent. Of course, I may be "projecting," myself, in making this analysis. However, it seems to me that the balance of forces between "emotion" and "reason" was remarkably even in Ruth Benedict's case. No faction got the upper hand altogether. Responsiveness to Spengler's intuition was balanced by respect for the rationality incarnated in Boas. Indeed, it may have been this very awareness of co-existing but "equally valid" approaches to life that led to the relativism which permeated Ruth Benedict's work.

But I have been Dionysian enough in throwing out such wild suggestions, and perhaps, like a Blackfoot Indian, I am balancing dangerously upon a thin knife-edge of speculation. So before I do any more damage, either to Dr. Benedict or to myself, let me turn to our final question: What was Ruth Benedict's positive contribution to social science?

It may sound paradoxical, in the light of what has gone before, but I think that Ruth Benedict made a very great contribution to present-day anthropology, not as a pamphleteer on race, not as a harried Washington bureaucrat answering too many telephone calls, not as the author of any particular book or article, but rather for the aims she pursued and the kinds of questions which she asked about ethnological material. Ruth Benedict's dignity lay in the fact that she went after important issues. Anthropologists who classified potsherds or measured skulls could afford to criticize her methodology. Their procedures, no doubt, were impeccable in comparison to hers, but the final value of their work still remains to be discovered. Too many of Boas's students got bogged down among the intricate details of kinship-systems or basket-weaves without having much understanding of why they worked so hard. When Franz Boas published page after page of blueberry-pie recipes in Kwakiutl, the old man probably knew what he was after; but when his students did the same kind of thing, they often lacked the driving central purpose which animated Boas. They mastered techniques and methods within their special fields, but often accomplished little more than that. It requires courage to stick to the important issues, and Ruth Benedict had that courage.

Like Boas, Ruth Benedict was very serious about her work in life. Time was short, she felt, and there was only room for the vital things. Her sense of dedication to a difficult and serious task marked everything she did. Her students immediately felt this and respected her essential dignity of spirit. In her later years, beset by phone calls, interruptions, manuscripts to read and refugees to interview, she moved through her book-lined office with a kind of sad, blurry nobility, overworked but always with a renewing buoyancy of spirit, kindliness, and deep sense of social responsibility. Perhaps the main thing about Ruth Benedict was the spiritual influence which she exerted upon her students and those who worked with her. Those who read her books may perhaps forget what they have learned; but those who knew Ruth Benedict in any way will always remember her as a symbol of spiritual and intellectual quest.