Ruth Benedict: Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern

Notes

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] [331], (1) Lines: 0 to 37 ——— 1.85165pt ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [331], (1) notes 1. ruth benedict’s life and work 1. For humor and imagination in the marriage, see Stassinos (1997). 2. The phrases quoted here and in the first section of this chapter are Benedict’s definitions of her image of an arc. She did not write “arc of personality,” as attributed to her by Banner (2003:309). That phrase carries a different meaning from Benedict’s. See below for Benedict’s nonconcern with personality. 3. The spelling, Kwakiutl, was used by Boas, from whose work Benedict drew her materials. I use this spelling because it is familiar, even though the Indians themselves consider it inaccurate. The problems with the spelling and other ways of rendering the tribal name are discussed by Harry F. Wollcott (2004). He recommends using Boas’s name for the tribe. 4. Lois Banner (2003) suggests that Patterns of Culture employs the literary device of a journey passing from earth through hell. In this scheme, Kwakiutl and Dobu represent hells, Kwakiutl for its excesses in the Cannibal Society and Dobu for the prevalence of magic. This interpretation plays light with the fundamental message of cultural relativism, the central point of the book. Benedict was hardly expounding the Western dualism of good and evil. She referred to vigor in Kwakiutl life; while Dobuans had much cause for anxiety, life there was far from the evil of Dante’s hell or the Greek underworld. 5. Varenne and McDermott characterize both Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by the phrase “the individual writ large.” They write of Benedict: “Posterity remembers her mostly in terms of a culture-asindividual -personality-writ-large theory of socialization,” and they follow this interpretation (1998:164, 166). See Boon (1999:28) on misremembering Patterns of Culture. 6. Benedict participated in Kardiner’s seminar supported by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1936–37, following Ruth Bunzel, who had joined it the previous year, and that spring Benedict chaired three sessions on competition and cooperation in primitive societies, the subject of Mead’s edited book based on Benedict’s students’ work and on a seminar conducted by Mead with these students and published that year. Mead was doing fieldwork in Bali at the time. In that session, Benedict, along with Ruth Bunzel, also presented Zuni ethnographic data. But relations between Kardiner and Benedict were uneasy,and Benedict wrote Mead concerning a session in which John Dollard had presented an analysis of an African American schoolteacher, which she thought neglected cultural factors:“I’d carefully avoided speaking during the seminar because it was at that time when anything I did in Kardiner’s presence might scare him to death; he was being ‘rejected’ all over the place” (rb to mm, August 22, 1937, mm b1). During the following year, Ralph Linton joined Kardiner’s seminar and gave the 331 Notes to Pages 21–56 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 [332], (2) Lines: 37 to ——— 11.59964 ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [332], (2) main presentations of ethnography, and Benedict participated less. After reading Kardiner’s book, The Individual in his Society (1939), Benedict wrote Mead: “The first 100 pages bored me stiff but by the end of Ch IV he’d worked up some profitable phrasings” (rb to mm, October 25, 1939, mm b1). She recommended the book to Frederica DeLaguna for assignment to her class at Bryn Mawr:“Have you seen Kardiner’s book The Individual in his Society? It’s good, and might be used too. He has learned a lot from anthropology” (rb to fdl, February 28, 1940, rfb 28.2). Benedict critiqued Kardiner’s analysis of Zuni personality structure based on Bunzel’s and her own data in her course Religions of Primitive Peoples in 1947. She agreed with most of his points and challenged only one of them (Religions 4/29/47). On Kardiner and this seminar, see also Manson (1986). 7. The meaning of the title...