Patterns of Culture (1934)

As an anthropology undergraduate I remember my professors sighing when the name Ruth Benedict came up. "Ah, Ruth Benedict. Such a great writer." And it's true. Her Patterns of Culture (1934) is less known today as a call for cultural relativism (our current cultural relative moment exists at the level of the individual) than as a writer whose ease with words attracted students and allowed anthropologists to think of ethnographic monographs not simply as works of scientific discovery but of literature.

Like Margaret Mead, who wrote the preface to my ragged Mentor edition, Benedict was a student of Franz Boas, whose field work she drew on when contrasting the "Dionysian" Kwakwaka'wakw (dead name Kwakiutl) with the "Apollonian" Zuñi of western New Mexico. This past week I re-read Patterns of Culture's Chapter VI ("The Northwest Coast of America"), which focuses on Kwakwaka'wakw social organization (kinship and marriage), with an emphasis on social stratification, slavery and cannibalsm, but also on the potlatch -- not as happy party where everyone goes home with a gift bag, but a ritualized shit show of power, wealth and shaming.

Here's the concluding paragraph (with my asides):

"The segment of human behaviour which the Northwest Coast has marked out to institutionalize in its culture is one which is recognized as abnormal in our civilization, and yet it is sufficiently close to the attitudes of our own culture to be intelligible to us and we have a definite vocabulary with which we may discuss it. The megalomaniac paranoid trend is a definite danger in our society [she might well have been referring to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler]. It faces us with a choice of possible attitudes. One is to brand it as abnormal and reprehensible, and it is the attitude we have chosen in our civilization [Putin, Trump, et al.]. The other extreme is to make it the essential attribute of ideal man [Is Twitter a form of potlatching?], and this is the solution in the culture of the Northwest Coast." (195)