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Ruth Benedict: Japanese Culture
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While alleging that Benedict belongs to those whom Edward Said would call “Orientalists”, Lummis seemed to have revealed his own value orientation. He noted that “flaws in the book [The Chrysanthemum and the Sword] have been difficult for many Western scholars to see,” (Italics added). A simple, yet legitimate, question needed to be raised here: what indeed motivated him to attach such a caveat? Is this just a (not-so) innocent remark to cajole or flatter the Japanese audience or does it indicate something deeper? If to be the latter, Lummis would feel quite comfortable with the school of thought which holds that the Japanese snow is so unique that only a pair of skis made in Japan, not foreign-made ones, should be used on the snow hills of Japan.
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The other three contributors read Benedict in a more negative light. Social psychologist Minami Hiroshi’s critique revolves around details of Benedict’s interview technique. He questions the appropriateness of samples that were supposedly taken from Japanese-Americans who were born in Japan during the Meiji period and, with emigration to the U.S., preserved the old customs, while the reality in Japan itself moved away from them. Similarly, for Minami, the Japanese films Benedict studied in writing Chrysanthemum were biased from the outset, given that those films were made for specific propaganda purposes and were designed to be exported to the U.S.
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Melville Herskovits defends Benedict's position. Herskovits defends relativism on the grounds that it is an antidote to ethnocentrism, which has led Europeans and Americans to behave with intolerance toward cultures with different values. (Ironically, Benedict herself abandoned ethical relativism when she saw that it required her to endorse Nazi rule in Germany.)
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