She has contributed to cultural anthropology with her studies revealing the relationship between culture and personality.
(1887-1948) American anthropologist.
Ruth Fulton Benedict was born on June 5, 1887, in New York. Her father was a surgeon. She was an introverted child who stayed away from people because of her hard of hearing. She studied English literature at Vassar College, which she graduated from in 1909, wrote poetry for a while, and published them under the pseudonym, Anne Singleton. She continued her interest in literature when she started her anthropology studies. She married biochemist Stanley R. Benedict in 1914. After trying various pursuits, she began attending anthropology lectures at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1919. She enrolled at Columbia University at the age of 34 and began working with Franz Boasile, one of the leading figures in American anthropology. Unlike her teacher's physics education, Benedict's study of the humanities and her interest in poetry was influential in her evaluation of anthropology as a branch of the humanities.
Benedict received her doctorate in 1923 with her thesis, The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America, which examined the North American Indians. She began teaching at Columbia University that same year and worked as an assistant in the anthropology department until Boas' departure in 1937. During the 1920s and 1930s, she conducted field studies and studies on various Native Americans. Over time, due to the exhaustion of field research, she chose the path of coming to syntheses from the research of other anthropologists. She traveled to Washington during World War II and, while working in the Department of War Intelligence, conducted research with colleagues on various European and Far Eastern cultures, particularly Thailand and Japan. These studies formed the basis of the "Studies in Contemporary Cultures" project that Benedict led at Columbia University after the war. She became a professor in 1948. She died in New York in September of the same year.
Benedict's doctoral thesis aimed to test various theories about the origins of religion under the influence of the diffusionist approach, which was prevalent at the time and suggested that cultural integration was accidental. Boas and Robert Lowie, whose book Primitive Society was published in 1920, contributed greatly to the formation of this approach. Benedict became interested in folklore studies after giving her doctorate thesis and directed the American Folklore Journal from 1925 to 1939.
Since Benedict did not find the idea that cultures could be integrated randomly and arbitrarily enough, she directed her studies to the search for an "integrating element". She obtained the first clues of the integrative element she was looking for as a result of a field trip she made in 1927 among the Pima Indians, who showed extreme behavior characteristics not seen in the Pueblo Indians. She presented these clues in her paper "Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest" in 1928 and developed her views in her book Patterns of Culture. In this book, which is one of the most important of her published anthropological treatises, Benedict, under the influence of the neo-Kantian philosopher Dilthey like her teacher Boas, tried to place the "integrating element" at the level of subjective thought. According to Benedict, who argues that the differences between cultures are similar to the differences between individuals, cultures also have distinctive features like individuals. In this respect, cultures are a broad reflection of individual psychology. Benedict called this integrating element the "cultural cluster". Inspired by Nietzsche's famous book Die Geburt der Tragödie, she clustered the Pueblo culture as Apollonian and the Plains Indians as Dionysian.
Benedict, in Patterns of Culture, completely departed from the sociological approach developed at the University of Chicago in the 1930s under the influence of the British anthropologist Radeliffe-Brown, and wrote the following on the "integration" she chose as the basic concept in the study of cultural events: "The most important sociological unit is not institutions... but cultural clusters”. According to Benedict, the main creative force behind culture is "integration", which is an "emotional and aesthetic" force rather than a social and structural factor. “Integration”, which is a feeling that exists in the mind of the individual, is the selection, rejection, and adaptation of cultural characteristics by individuals according to the subjective measures of their own culture. The integrating element behind a cultural cluster is basically an emotional pattern; Like the "Apollonian" trait of the Pueblos, which emphasizes moderation and collective orientation, or the "Dionysian" trait of the Plains Indians, characterized by extremism and extreme individualism. These views of Benedict were the product of her teacher, Boas. Boas argued that one of the major creative forces of culture was the subjective search for security of individuals and groups and that traditions were fundamentally irrational. According to Boas and Benedict, culture should be considered in the context of internal consistency, and the elements that make up internal consistency should be considered relatively independent of external influences, for example, the influence of other cultures. Every culture has its own "emotional-aesthetic" structure.
Benedict like many other American anthropologists during World War II put her research at the service of the American government's war activities. From 1943 until the post-war period, she worked on nations that were in contact with the United States as allies, enemies, or countries under enemy occupation. Continuing these orientations in the last years of his life, during the war years, Benedict studied the "national characters" of complex societies. It is the main work of this period Chrysanthemum and the Sword Benedict, which examines Japanese society and was published in 1946. According to Margaret Mead, this book, which is Benedict's most prized work, will go on to be considered a classic of its kind.
WORKS (mainly):
Patterns of Culture, 1934,
Race: Science and Politia, 1940,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, 1946,
“Anthropology and the Hummies”, American Anthropologist, L, 1948,
“Child Rearing in Certain European Countries” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, XIX, 1949, (d.s.)