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Considered one of the most influential and articulate figures in American anthropology, Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) was trained by Franz Boas and Elsie Clews Parsons and collaborated with the equally renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, a student of hers with whom she was for a time romantically involved. When Benedict died suddenly at the age of sixty-one, she was popularly known for two best-selling works: Patterns of Culture, which became an exemplary model of the integration of societies, and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a study of Japanese culture commissioned by the U.S. government during World War II. Benedict's lasting contribution to anthropology, however, cannot be appreciated solely through her more famous works. Equally innovative were her unpublished or little-noticed writings, which covered such topics as cross-cultural attributes of free societies, the national cultures of Thailand and Romania, and the comparison of Asian consensus politics with American political patterns. This biography by one of Benedict's last graduate students, Virginia Heyer Young, draws on these works, on Benedict's correspondence and collaborative work with Margaret Mead, and on unpublished course notes. Young finds the ordering patterns in the rich materials Benedict left in her papers and demonstrates that Benedict was embarking on new interpretive directions in the last decade of her life—bringing her methods of holistic comparison to bear on contemporary cultures and on the dynamics of social cohesion. Benedict's work, in fact, anticipated trends in anthropology in the decades to come by projecting a framework of individuals not only shaped by their culture but also using their culture for personal or collective objectives. Young's arresting and nuanced portrait of Benedict in her last years leads one to wonder what direction American anthropology might have taken had Benedict completed the book she was working on at the time of her death.
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Edward Servin
reviewed Ruth Benedict on June 06, 2016
Ruth Benedict
A Thinking Person's Guide to 50 Years of British Anthropology
I first began to study anthropology 57 years ago, arriving at university never having heard of the subject. I wound up as an anthropologist, but also something of an area specialist (South Asia). I never had pretensions to be a theorist, nor have I ever aspired to expertise in kinship studies. My training was under American anthropologists to be sure, but they encouraged us to read and think about British and French scholarship as well. I never, however, felt that any one of these three schools had all the answers. One needed to develop an understanding by reading, doing field work, and thinking for yourself. British anthropology, from 1922 to 1972, as covered in Kuper's book, took a harder line. You focussed on the issues laid down by the leading lights, you went to study in "the colonies", mainly Africa, and wrote within the doctrine---or you got nowhere. It was another age. The chief figures that dominated the field in Britain---Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, Gluckmann, and Leach---published any number of brilliant theoretical works, but allowed little deviation from the established topics. Functionalism (human behavior is guided by utilitarian or `functional' reasons) gave way to structuralism (analysis of socio-political structure--especially kinship--can explain human behavior/culture), then the field began to splinter a bit. The linguistic and psychological concerns of the Americans and more so the sociological and mythological analyses of the French (Durkheim, Mauss, Levi-Strauss) finally did influence the British anthropologists. The full story of the twists and turns of British anthropological theory await you in ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND ANTHROPOLOGY along with a good amount of personal detail about the main protagonists.
Kuper's book is not an easy read. It is academic, but clear. If you have no prior acquaintance with anthropology, this is definitely not the place to begin. However, if you are teaching Anthropology or if you wish a brilliant summary of the field's history in the UK, or if you just want to review your understanding of developments as I did, this book is well-worth reading.
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