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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [First Page] [103], (1) Lines: 0 to 68 ——— 7.39998pt ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [103], (1) chapter 5 Beyond Psychological Types Contemporary Cultures and Return to Pattern In the Office of War Information (owi), Benedict was assigned the problem of discerning patterns in strategic cultures for general guidance in dealing with their governments and providing specific knowledge that would predict behavior under conditions expected in the course of the war. For instance, owi wanted advice on propaganda broadcasts to enemy troops, on how to ease relations between American troops and civilian populations of allied or occupied nations,on interpreting intelligence data on enemy commitment to keep fighting, on how to increase troop surrenders, and on terms of Japanese national surrender. Her first assignments were to complete work anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer had begun for the same office on Burma and to draw up an account of Thai culture. Both countries were of strategic importance, with Burma on the supply route to China’s inland wartime capital, Chungking , and Thailand allied with Japan. In September 1943 Benedict completed a forty-nine-page report on Thailand. In November she wrote a sixty-five-page report on Romania.1 By January 1944 she had completed a seventeen-page report on Dutch culture and an eight-page memorandum on problems foreseeable in U.S. troop presence in Holland and recommending dos and don’ts for army broadcasts to the Dutch. In the next few months she wrote a long report on German morale and brief reports on Italy, Finland, Norway, and France.2 She read historical and political accounts of these nations, novels, folklore, and social analyses. Much of the data needed to discern behavioral aspects of cultures had to be obtained in interviews with culture members living in the United States. In regard to Japan, she explained in the foreword to her final report to owi that her study was limited to Japanese ethics. She continued: Information on Japan’s ethical categories and tenets was given only casually and inadequately in the literature on Japan, whether written by Japanese or by Westerners, and the material had to be obtained from those who 103 Beyond Psychological Types 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [104], (2) Lines: 68 to ——— 7.79997p ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [104], (2) had lived in Japan. Japanese reared in Japan discussed with me movies, textbook materials and novels by Japanese, they described events they had participated in, they gave the Japanese phrasing of praise and blame, and the consequences of various acts. Westerners who had lived in Japan also described their observations. (u.p. 1945) In these studies, Benedict’s use of pattern is in some respects different, but essentially the same, as in her work on the Zunis, Plains Indians, Kwakiutls, and Dobu. Pattern is not named by a psychological type or, more accurately, by a worldview, as in her work on the primitive groups. The idea of psychological types in culture arose as an explanation of the process of bringing cohesion to a culture, a process she added to Boas’s model of cultures in which the distribution of culture traits was often the only known factor. The diffusion process offered many traits for groups to adopt, reject, or redesign. In their choices and their redesigns, groups were guided by their preexisting preferences and aversions, by their psychological disposition; members of cultures sought consistency and integration. All the contemporary cultures she studied later differed from these preliterate ones in that written texts and legends preserved parts of their histories in their present views of themselves; furthermore, the interrelations of levels of their hierarchical social structures affected behavior and thought at each level. She took into account people’s consciousness of their history and effects of class stratification. For example, a Thai absolute monarchy of six hundred years duration, up to 1932, had state laws of kinship, marriage, and dispute settlement, thus extending state authority down to the household and village level, and state authority met no forceful kin or locality groupings...

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