Рут Бенедикт: Америкалық антрополог және фольклорші ғалымы

American anthropologist and folklorologist (1887–1948)
the American anti war activist, researcher and journalist

Ruth Fulton Benedict (June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist. She was born in New York City, attended Vassar College, and graduated in 1909. After studying anthropology at the New School of Social Research under Elsie Clews Parsons, she entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1921, where she studied under Franz Boas. She received her Ph. D. and joined the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues. Benedict was president of the American Anthropological Association and also a prominent member of the American Folklore Society. She became the first woman to be recognized as a prominent leader of a learned profession. Her mother worked in the city as a school teacher, and her father was a homeopathic doctor and surgeon. His illness caused the family to move back to Norwich, New York, to the farm of Ruth's maternal grandparents, the Shattucks. Ruth had a fascination with death as a young child. When she was four years old, her grandmother took her to see an infant that had recently died. Upon seeing the dead child's face, Ruth claimed that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. However, through reading authors like Walt Whitman and Richard Jefferies, who stressed a worth, importance, and enthusiasm for life, she held onto hope for a better future. She also began work on writing a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and other lesser known women who (she felt) deserved more acknowledgement for their work and contributions. After working with Goldenweiser for a year, he sent her to work as a graduate student with Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1921. She developed a close friendship with Boas, who took on a role as a kind of father figure in her life. Benedict lovingly referred to him as "Papa Franz." Boas gave her graduate credit for the courses that she had completed at the New School for Social Research. Benedict wrote her dissertation, "The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America," and received the PhD in anthropology in 1923. Benedict taught her first anthropology course at Barnard College in 1922 and among the students was Margaret Mead. Benedict was a significant influence on Mead. Boas regarded Benedict as an asset to the anthropology department, and in 1931, he appointed her as assistant professor in anthropology, something that was impossible until her divorce from Stanley Benedict that same year. One student who felt especially fond of Ruth Benedict was Ruth Landes. Letters that Landes sent to Benedict state that she was enthralled by the way in which Benedict taught her classes and with the way that she forced the students to think in an unconventional way. Benedict was understandably insulted by Linton's appointment, and the Columbia department was divided between the two rival figures of Linton and Benedict, both accomplished anthropologists with influential publications, neither of whom ever mentioned the work of the other.

Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were two of the most influential and famous anthropologists of their time. Both got along well with their shared passion for each other's work and the sense of pride that they felt in being successful working women while that was still uncommon. They were frequently known to critique each other's work; they entered into a companionship that began through their work, but during its early period, it also had an erotic character. Both Benedict and Mead wanted to dislodge stereotypes about women that were widely believed during their time and to show people that working women could also be successful even though working society was seen as a man's world. In her memoir about her parents, With a Daughter's Eye, Mead's daughter strongly implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual. In 1946, Benedict received the Achievement Award from the American Association of University Women. After Benedict died of a heart attack in 1948, Mead kept the legacy of Benedict's work going by supervising projects that Benedict would have looked after and by editing and publishing notes from studies that Benedict had collected throughout her life. After the war, she focused on finishing her book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Her original notes for the synergy lecture were never found after her death. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1947. She continued her teaching after the war and advanced to the rank of full professor only two months before her death in New York on September 17, 1948.

Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) was translated into fourteen languages and was for years published in many editions and used as standard reading material for anthropology courses in American universities. The essential idea in Patterns of Culture is, according to the foreword by Margaret Mead, "her view that human cultures are 'personality writ large. As Benedict wrote in that book, "A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action" (46). Each culture, she held, chooses from "the great arc of human potentialities" only a few characteristics, which become the leading personality traits of the persons living in that culture. Those traits comprise an interdependent constellation of aesthetics and values in each culture which together add up to a unique gestalt. For example, she described the emphasis on restraint in Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest and the emphasis on abandon in the Native American cultures of the Great Plains. She used the Nietzschean opposites of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as the stimulus for her thought about these Native American cultures. She describes how in ancient Greece the worshipers of Apollo emphasized order and calm in their celebrations. In contrast, the worshipers of Dionysus, the god of wine, emphasized wildness, abandon, and letting go, like Native Americans. She described in detail the contrasts between rituals, beliefs, and personal preferences among people of diverse cultures to show how each culture had a "personality," which was encouraged in each individual. Other anthropologists of the culture and personality school also developed those ideas, notably Margaret Mead in her Coming of Age in Samoa (published before "Patterns of Culture") and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (published just after Benedict's book came out). Benedict was a senior student of Franz Boas when Mead began to study with them, and they had extensive and reciprocal influence on each other's work. Abram Kardiner was also affected by these ideas, and in time, the concept of "modal personality" was born: the cluster of traits most commonly thought to be observed in people of any given culture. Benedict in Patterns of Culture, expresses her belief in cultural relativism. She desired to show that each culture has its own moral imperatives that can be understood only if one studies that culture as a whole. It was wrong, she felt, to disparage the customs or values of a culture different from one's own. Those customs had a meaning to the people who lived them that should not be dismissed or trivialized. Others should not try to evaluate people by their standards alone. Morality, she argued, was relative to the values of the culture in which one operated. As she described the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest (based on the fieldwork of her mentor Boas), the Pueblo of New Mexico (among whom she had direct experience), the nations of the Great Plains, and the Dobu culture of New Guinea (regarding whom she relied upon Mead and Reo Fortune's fieldwork), she gave evidence that their values, even where they may seem strange, are intelligible in terms of their own coherent cultural systems and should be understood and respected. That also formed a central argument in her later work on the Japanese following World War II. Critics have objected to the degree of abstraction and generalization inherent in the "culture and personality" approach. Some have argued that particular patterns that she found may be only a part or a subset of the whole cultures. For example, David Friend Aberle writes that the Pueblo people may be calm, gentle, and much given to ritual in one mood or set of circumstances, but they may be suspicious, retaliatory, and warlike in other circumstances. In 1936, she was appointed an associate professor at Columbia University. However, Benedict had already assisted in the training and guidance of several Columbia students of anthropology including Margaret Mead and Ruth Landes. Benedict was among the leading cultural anthropologists who were recruited by the US government for war related research and consultation after the US entered World War II.

One of Benedict's lesser known works was a pamphlet "The Races of Mankind," which she wrote with her colleague at the Columbia University Department of Anthropology, Gene Weltfish. The pamphlet was intended for American troops and set forth in simple language with cartoon illustrations the scientific case against racist beliefs. "The world is shrinking," begin Benedict and Weltfish. "Thirty four nations are now united in a common cause—victory over Axis aggression, the military destruction of fascism" (p. 1). The nations united against fascism, they continue, include "the most different physical types of men." The writers explicate, in section after section, their best evidence for human equality. They want to encourage all types of people to join and not fight among themselves. "[A]ll the peoples of the earth," they point out, "are a single family and have a common origin." We all have just so many teeth, so many molars, just so many little bones and muscles, and so we can have come from only one set of ancestors, no matter what our color, the shape of our head, the texture of our hair. "The races of mankind are what the Bible says they are—brothers. In their bodies is the record of their brotherhood."

Benedict is known not only for her earlier Patterns of Culture but also for her later book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the study of the society and culture of Japan that she published in 1946, incorporating results of her wartime research. This book is an instance of anthropology at a distance. The study of a culture through its literature, newspaper clippings, films and recordings, etc. was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its allies during World War II. Unable to visit Nazi Germany or Japan under Hirohito, anthropologists used the cultural materials to produce studies at a distance. They attempted to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression and hoped to find possible weaknesses or means of persuasion that had been missed. Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding Japanese culture, which had matters that Americans found themselves unable to comprehend. For instance, Americans considered it quite natural for American prisoners of war to want their families to know they were alive and to keep quiet when asked for information about troop movements, etc. However, Japanese prisoners of war apparently gave information freely and did not try to contact their families. Why was that? Why, too, did Asian peoples neither treat the Japanese as their liberators from Western colonialism nor accept their own supposedly just place in a hierarchy that had Japanese at the top? Benedict played a major role in grasping the place of the Emperor of Japan in Japanese popular culture, and formulating the recommendation to US President Franklin Roosevelt that permitting continuation of the Emperor's reign had to be part of the eventual surrender offer. Other Japanese who have read this work, according to Margaret Mead, found it on the whole accurate but somewhat "moralistic." Sections of the book were mentioned in Takeo Doi's book, The Anatomy of Dependence, but Doi is highly critical of Benedict's concept that Japan has a "shame" culture, whose emphasis is on how one's moral conduct appears to outsiders in contradistinction to the Christian American "guilt" culture in which the emphasis is on the individual's internal conscience. Doi considered that claim to imply clearly that the former value system is inferior to the latter one.

The American Anthropology Association awards an annual prize named after Benedict. The Ruth Benedict Prize has two categories, one for monographs by one writer and one for edited volumes. The prize recognizes "excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic." A 46¢ Great Americans series postage stamp in her honor was issued on October 20, 1995. Benedict College in Stony Brook University is named after her. In 2005, Benedict was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

AAAS (American Academy of Arts and Sciences). Banner, Lois W. 2003. Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. Vintage. Benedict, Ruth. 1905–1948. Vassar College. Archives and Special Collections Library
Benedict, Ruth. 1931. Tales of the Cochiti Indians. Bureau of American Ethnology. Benedict, Ruth. 1959. An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict. Ed. Margaret Mead. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Benedict, Ruth. 1989. The chrysanthemum and the sword: patterns of Japanese culture. With a foreword by Ezra F. Vogel. Houghton Mifflin. Benedict, Ruth. 1989. Patterns of Culture. Preface by Margaret Mead; foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson. Houghton Mifflin. Caffrey, Margaret M. Ruth Benedict: Stranger in this Land. 1989. Austin: University of Texas Press. Janiewski, Dolores E. & Lois W. Banner (eds.). 2004. Reading Benedict/reading Mead: feminism, race, and imperial visions – New studies in American intellectual and cultural history. JHU Press. Lutkehaus, Nancy. 2008. Margaret Mead: the making of an American icon. Princeton University Press. Maksel, Rebecca. 2004. [Review of Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and their circle]. Women's Review of Books January 1, 2004, 21(4):15–16
Maslow, Abraham H., Honigmann, John J., and Mead, Margaret. 1970. Synergy: Some Notes of Ruth Benedict. American Anthropologist, 72(2): 320–333. Mead, Margaret. 1959. Preface to Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture in Benedict 1959 (above). Mead, Margaret. 1959. "Search: 1920–1930". In Benedict 1959 (An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict, above). Modell, Judith Schachter. 1983. Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life University of Pennsylvania Press. Smithsonian Institution, Department of Anthropology. Guide to the Collections of the National Anthropological Archives (#L1). Young, Virginia Heyer. 2005. Ruth Benedict : Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. .