Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) was an American anthropologist and student of Franz Boas whose work on the relationship between culture and personality made her one of the most widely read social scientists of the mid-twentieth century. Her most influential book, Patterns of Culture (1934), argued that cultures function as integrated wholes — that a culture's practices, beliefs, and institutions are organized around a coherent psychological orientation, which Benedict characterized with terms borrowed from Nietzsche: 'Apollonian' (restrained, measured, collective) versus 'Dionysian' (ecstatic, individualistic, boundary-violating). The Zuni of the American Southwest exemplified Apollonian culture; the Kwakwaka'wakw of the Pacific Northwest exemplified Dionysian culture. The typology was influential and almost certainly too tidy: Benedict was interpreting enormously complex societies through a binary borrowed from nineteenth-century aesthetics, and the fit between the schema and the ethnographic evidence was more asserted than demonstrated.

Benedict's wartime work, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) — a study of Japanese culture and psychology written to assist the Allied occupation — represents the most ambitious and problematic application of cultural anthropology to policy. It was written without fieldwork (she never visited Japan) and shaped influential American assumptions about Japanese psychology that persisted through the occupation. Whether it was useful is disputed; whether its methods were adequate to its claims is not.