Ruth Benedict: Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern

7. Ruth Benedict’s Contribution to Anthropology

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] [163], (1) Lines: 0 to 43 ——— 6.2pt PgVa ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [163], (1) chapter 7 Ruth Benedict’s Contribution to Anthropology Placing Herself among Theorists Ruth Benedict remained interested in the big problems taken on by the nineteenth-century anthropologists and in some of their modes of thought. Although she taught and wrote mainly about the diversity of cultural behavior , she was interested in the nineteenth-century hypothesis of psychic unity of humankind. She considered Theodore Waitz “a careful student” on this question; furthermore, she considered him an early proponent of the idea of culture because he explained progress by psychocultural conditions and rejected environmental, technological, and racial explanations of progress. He recognized cumulative cultural development but did not think there had been unilineal evolution. She thought that in spite of shortcomings in their methods, theories, and assumptions, some of the nineteenth-century evolutionists’ analyses of primitive societies were valid and lasting contributions , for example, E. B. Tylor’s writings on animism and his work on criteria for determining the independent invention or diffusion of traits of culture and R. R. Marrett’s placement early in human thought of the idea of manna, which “has not been completely superceded in Western culture but has been considerably reduced” (Theory 10/7/47). Benedict commended L. H. Morgan’s invention of kinship studies. She assumed, along with Tylor, that there were “cradle traits of mankind,” and they were seen in the ethnographies of remote primitive cultures, Tierra del Fuego,Australia, Melanesia. One of them was the widespread “making-of-man cult,” with its myth about women’s initial possession of sacred knowledge and men’s ritual usurpation of this knowledge. She thought Adolf Bastian’s work fell short principally because he did not try to develop a method for distinguishing between what he referred to as volkegedanken and elemetargedanken, local ideas and universal ideas, and did not say what he would include in the important latter category. In several commentaries Benedict itemized cultural universals that had been generally agreed on among anthropologists, and she began adding to them. She defined them as beyond cultural relativity, a status that did not 163 Ruth Benedict’s Contribution to Anthropology 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 [164], (2) Lines: 43 to ——— 0.0pt Pg ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [164], (2) claim universality but meant they were necessary to beneficial and durable society, which was in fact a condition assumed for universals. Moreover, she said:“Traits beyond cultural relativity are a common denominator of ethical moral sanctions”(Social Organization 12/10/46). A. R. Radcliffe-Brown had a similar objective, and he defined a condition he called good health in society, a condition Benedict also sought to define. She respected Tylor’s procedures for testing propositions, his selective use of evolution as explanation, his varied investigations and sense of problem. She noted also his explanation of the idea sometimes found in cultures that all deaths are murder – that this idea indicated an “unhappy people” – was the earliest example of “that kind of point,” meaning psychological evaluation of culture as she discussed it in the last lecture of Theory, Culture. It became apparent that she herself was engaged with some of the problems and methods of nineteenth-century anthropology:“Knowledge of the range of institutions throughout the world isimportant.Onemusttrytofindoutthemeaningorimportanceof thepresence or absence of particular institutions” (Personality and Culture 2/13/47). The book on comparative problems probably was still on her agenda. She regretted that the early theorists of comparativism had so little data available to them, and she saw the main objective of anthropology as its obligation to collect the data of the diversity of world cultures. Boas’s critique of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought had not rejected the whole idea of social evolution, and Benedict itemized“valid evolutionary principles” in the summations of two of her courses, noting mastery of the environment,increasing population density,and development of complexity of organization (Social Organization 1/16/47; Personality and Culture 4/8...