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Ruth Benedict: Cultures
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Ruth Benedict was a brilliant anthropologist, noted chiefly for her interpretations of cultures. In this selection she described how great, in her opinion, is the wealth of possible human motivations, and indicated that each culture selects for emphasis only a few of the motives that can activate mankind. Thus, in a sense, culture rather than human nature determines a man's motives and drives. To put it another way, every man has many potential interests and goals, but society to a large extent determines which will be actualized. Mozart could not have been a musician if he had been a devout Quaker, nor Napoleon a conqueror if he had been an Eskimo.
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When the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict was asked to write a report on Japan in the spring of 1945 for the American Office of War Information, she was working under difficult conditions. She had never been to Japan and had no chance of going there during wartime. She did her ''field research'' among Japanese-Americans living in the United States and wrote Report 25, titled ''Japanese Behavior Patterns,'' in just three months between May and August, shortly before the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
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Ruth Benedict believed in Moral Relativism, which is the belief that morals are different in every culture and there is no universal right or wrong. The morals of the individual or society are all that matters when assessing whether an individual is right or wrong. Moral Relativism is based on two things: Primacy of De Facto Values and Cultural Variation. Primacy of De Facto Values means that morals should be based on how individuals actually behave, not on how individuals should behave. Cultural Variation means that morals are different in different cultures. There are ... two ways to approach morality: de facto morality or ideal morality.
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Ruth Fulton Benedict, an American cultural anthropologist, was born in the city of New York in 1887 and died there in 1948. Her early years were spent on her maternal grandparents' farm near Norwich, New York as her father died when Benedict was just eighteen months old. Benedict's mother, Bertrice Shattuck Fulton (VC 1885), moved her family to St. Joseph, Missouri and Owatonna, Minnesota before becoming a librarian in Buffalo, New York when Ruth was eleven. In 1909, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, Benedict traveled to Europe with college friends. Following that, she was a social worker for a year, then spent three years teaching before marrying Stanley Benedict, a biochemistry professor at Cornell Medical School, in 1914.
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Of many controversies and debates over Ruth Benedict and Chrysanthemum, Douglas Lummis’s critical reading and reactions to it offer a point of departure in considering how Chrysanthemum and Benedict are approached in Japan from the 1980s onwards. By the 1980s, Japan’s long-lasting economic boom originating in the Korean War (1950-1953) had been consolidated, and the material life of ordinary Japanese had become remarkably affluent as compared to the postwar devastation. From 1964 to 1973, Japan’s economy grew by a yearly average of 10.1 per cent, as compared to the U.S.’s 4 per cent, Britain’s 3.1 per cent, France’s 5.4 per cent, and West Germany’s 4.7 per cent (Masamura 1982: 234). Its thriving cities and businesses gave rise to the globally-appreciated cult of “Japanese-style management.” Already from the 1970s, the literature on Japanese cultural uniqueness had become pervasive in Japanese writing, offering domestic readers a chance to indulge their sense of cultural superiority compared to others in the world who were suffering from poorly-growing economies and social and political chaos. Predictably, it was a time when the cultural traits Benedict offered in Chrysanthemum as evidence of Japanese uniqueness -- which had in part led to Japan’s defeat -- was turned around and re-endorsed as positive factors that brought Japan’s remarkable national economy out of the ashes.
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Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) was one of the most eminent anthropologists of the twentieth century. Her profoundly influential books Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture were bestsellers when they were first published, and they have remained indispensable works for the study of culture in the many decades since.
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