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Ruth Benedict: Anthropology
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Ruth Benedict was a pioneering anthropologist who became America’s leading specialist in the field, best known for her “patterns of culture” theory. Her book by that name revolutionized anthropological study, igniting the work of the culture and personality movement within anthropology. She strengthened the bonds among the branches of social science: anthropology, sociology and psychology, and deepened public understanding of the impact of culture on human behavior and personality.
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Ruth Fulton Benedict was among the first American women to study anthropology. She rose to the top of her profession, earning international respect for her insight and scholarship. She is best known for her theory of "patterns of culture" that brought together anthropological, psychological, sociological, and philosophical considerations to explain that human behavior and concepts of deviance are cultural products.
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Benedict was born in New York City and raised in upstate New York. After graduating from Vassar College, she traveled to Europe where she met and married Stanley Benedict and divorced him in 1930. In her poetry and journals she criticized conventional marriage and wrote of a longing for love and an understanding of her sexuality. In addition to her poetry Benedict wrote a book on Mary Wollstonecraft before returning to school where she studied anthropology. She began teaching anthropology in 1923 at Columbia University where she met Margaret Mead. The two had a close, sometimes sexual, relationship for 25 years.
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As is well known, Ruth Benedict came to anthropology from English literature. She graduated from Vassar College in English, taught English at a girls school in California, and was a published poet all before she entered the Columbia graduate program in anthropology. That she received her Ph.D. in three semesters not only testifies to her brilliance, but ... suggests that she did not undergo a fundamental retraining in methodology. This is supported by her own testimony, that "[l]ong before I knew anything about anthropology, I had learned from Shakespearean criticism . . . habits of mind which at length made me an anthropologist." According to Margaret Mead, Benedict was able to transfer her sensibilities from literature to anthropology by seeing "each primitive culture . . . [as] . . . something comparable to a great work of art" whose internal consistency and intricacy was as aesthetically satisfying to the would-be explorer as was any single work of art.(6)
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The American cultural anthropologist Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887-1948) originated the configurational approach to culture. Her work has provided a bridge between the humanities and anthropology, as well as background for all later culture-personality studies.
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Chapter 4 discusses Benedicts concept of cultural relativity. Young follows research from a fieldwork project on North American Indians, begun in 1937, through prewar writings that addressed world problems to illustrate Benedicts intention to go beyond relativity. Benedict was intent on identifying social conditions and their outcomes, with the larger aim of discovering a range of social attitudes that would enable people to feel free to pursue their own goals: to achieve social freedom. She was aware of the limitations of cultural relativity, and prewar articles that discuss peacekeeping methods and conflict resolution illustrate her concern with applying anthropology.
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