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)

Patterns of Culture

A highlight of my university undergraduate career (I majored in anthropology) was reading Ruth Benedict. Like Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928) and the recently rediscovered Paul Radin (The Trickster, 1956), Benedict was a student of Franz Boas (I was a student of Bruce MacLean, who was a student of Stanley Diamond, who was mentored by Radin). Benedict's great book is Patterns of Culture (1934).

Writing in its 1958 "Preface", Margaret Mead had this to say of Patterns of Culture:

"... it is the best introduction we have to the widening of horizons by a comparative study of different cultures, through which we can see our own socially transmitted customary behaviour set beside that of other and strangely different people."

The "other and strangely different people" Benedict drew on in her study of cultures as "personality writ large" (Benedict) are the Kwakiutl Kwakwaka'wakw, the Pueblo (with whom she did fieldwork) and the Dobu.

Here is an excerpt from the introduction to Benedict's "Northwest Coast" section:

"Like most of the American Indians, except those of the southwest pueblos, the tribes of the northwest coast were Dionysian [Benedict characterized the Zuni as Apollonian]. In their religious ceremonies the final thing they strove for was ecstasy. The chief dancer, at least at the high point of his performance, should lose normal control of himself and be rapt into another state of existence. He should froth at the mouth, tremble violently and abnormally, do deeds which would be terrible in a normal state. Some dancers were tethered by four ropes held by attendants, so that they might not do irreparable damage in their frenzy. The dance songs celebrated this madness as a supernatural portent:

The gift of the spirit that destroys man's reason,
O real supernatural friend,[1] is making people afraid.
The gift of the spirit that destroys man's reason ,
O supernatural friend, scatters the people
who are in the house.[2]

[1] That is, Cannibal at the North End of the World, the supernatural patron of the dancer [Hamatsa?], in whose power he dances.

[2] That is, they flee in fear."