Ruth Benedict

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Ruth Benedict (1937)

Ruth Fulton Benedict (born June 5, 1887 in New York , † September 17, 1948 in New York) was the founder of a comparative cultural anthropology in the USA .

Life

Ruth Benedict, b. Fulton was born on a farm in the Shenango Valley, New York State. Her father was a doctor. She first studied at Vassar College . In 1914 she married the chemist Stanley Benedict , who died in 1936. She took a course at the newly founded New School for Social Research (then Free School of Political Science ) and was referred to AA Goldenweiser's anthropology seminar by her lecturer Elsie Clews Parsons . In 1921 Franz Boas accepted her for an anthropological degree at Columbia University , where she submitted her dissertation in 1923 . She stayed at that university but only received a full professorship two months before her death.

During the Second World War (1943–1945) Ruth Benedict worked as an advisor for the American secret service. On behalf of the US Office of War Information, she wrote studies on the Japanese national character based on interviews with Japanese prisoners of war.

research

Her studies are known among the Zuñi , Serrano , Cochiti , Pima and Hopi Indians in the southwest of the USA. Together with Margaret Mead , Ruth Fulton Benedict has carried out many research trips to Pacific regions, but her research results have been partially called into question in recent studies by the anthropologist Susanne Kuehling . Mead and Benedict developed a close scientific and friendly relationship. In the student movement of the late 1960s , the reception of the - methodologically controversial - cultural anthropological studies by Margaret Mead or Ruth Benedict was an important moment in order to question the apparent natural condition of traditional patriarchal structures. For Benedict, a central prerequisite for change was the recognition of " our own culture ... (as) only one of countless different ways of shaping human culture " (Benedict 1955, 182). As a pioneer, she had some difficulties getting through - for example, her work on the English suffragette, Mary Wollstonecraft, was never published.

Cultural relativism

Ruth Benedict agrees with Franz Boas and later Margaret Mead to cultural relativism . She understands cultures as individual wholes that can only be understood from within and refers to the enormous variability of values.

“The conviction, emphasized by Ruth Benedict and confirmed by her own ethnological research, of the merely secondary role that biological conditions play in the development of individual cultures, and the related conception of cultural diversity based on the same basis, became significant Manifestations that take the belief in an 'ideal' culture ad absurdum as well as the ominous delusion of the superiority of one race over all others. "

- Wolfgang von Einsiedel : Rowohlts German encyclopedia Volume 7, Hamburg 1955

Archetypes of culture

Her work Patterns of Culture , published in 1934, is one of her important works. Here it assumed as the most important basic assumption that human behavior is mainly learned and not innate, and that cultures develop permanent social patterns. Her work is based on the study of three tribal cultures: the Kwakiutl Indians from Vancouver Island , the Zuñi Indians in New Mexico and the Melanesian Dobu . The chapter on the islanders of Dobu is based on research by Reo Fortune . According to Benedict, this culture in particular demonstrates that “Western ethics” is not the only possible or more valuable basis of a functioning civilization, because on Dobu, for example, symbolic theft has been elevated to the highest virtue.

Chrysanthemum and sword

In June 1944, Benedict was commissioned by the US Office of War Information (OWI) to carry out a study on the culture of Japan , which was intended to guide US occupation policy after a foreseeable defeat of Japan in the Pacific War . Since field research in Japan was not possible due to the war situation, Benedict obtained her information mainly from secondary sources and from conversations with Japanese prisoners of war, emigrants and remigrants. She published the results of her work in 1946 under the title The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture . Their plea for maintaining the Japanese monarchy ( Tennō ) despite the defeat had a political impact . Effective but controversial, Benedict's comparison of the western world and Japan as a culture of guilt and shame remains . The chrysanthemum and sword , which was translated into Japanese in 1948, shaped the image of Japan for several generations in the West as well as the self-image of many Japanese.

Other texts

She also wrote poetry under the pseudonym Anne Singleton .

membership

In 1947 Benedict was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Aftermath

On October 20, 1995, a postage stamp with her portrait was published in the USA. The historian Wolfgang Reinhard confessed in 2007 that Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture was a book that changed his life .

Publications

  • The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America. 1923.
  • Configurations of Culture in North America. In: American Anthropologist. Volume 34, 1932, pp. 1-27.
  • Patterns of Culture. Houghton Mifflin, New York 1934.
    • (dt EA) cultures of primitive peoples. August Schröder Verlag, Stuttgart 1949.
    • German: archetypes of culture. In: rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie. Reinbek 1955.
  • Zuñi Mythology. 1935.
  • Edward Sapir . In: American Anthropologist. Volume 41, 1939, pp. 465-477.
  • Race - Science and Politics. Modern Age Books, New York 1940.
    • German: The race question in science and politics. Verlag Müller / Kiepenheuer, Bergen (II), Upper Bavaria, 1950.
  • Race and Racism. Routeledge, London 1942.
    • German: race research and race theory. Publishers Public Life, Göttingen 1947.
  • with Gene Weltfish: The Races of Mankind. The Public Affairs Committee, New York 1943.
    • Basis of the Comic There Are No Master Races. In: True Comics. No. 39, October 1944.
  • The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture. New York 1946.
    • German: chrysanthemum and sword. Forms of Japanese culture. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-518-12014-X .
  • The Story of My Life. In: Margaret Mead: An Anthropologist at Work. Writings of Ruth Benedict. Boston 1959, pp. 97-117.

literature

  • Lois W. Banner: Intertwined Lives. Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. Vintage Books, 2004, ISBN 0-679-77612-5 .
  • Margaret M. Caffrey: Ruth Benedict. Stranger in This Land. University of Texas, Austin 1989, ISBN 0-292-74655-5 .
  • Clifford Geertz : Works and Lives. Stanford 1988.
  • Virginia Heyer Young: Ruth Benedict. Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern. Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology . University of Nebraska, 2005, ISBN 0-8032-4919-5 .
  • Alfred Louis Kroeber : Configurations of Culture Growth. Berkeley 1944.
  • Margaret Mead : An Anthropologist at Work. Writings of Ruth Benedict. Boston 1959.
  • Margaret Mead: Ruth Benedict. A humanist in anthropology. New York 1974. (New edition: Columbia University Press, New York 2005)
  • Judith S. Model: Ruth Benedict. Patterns of a Life. University of Pennsylvania, 1983, ISBN 0-8122-7874-7 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Benedict, Ruth (1887–1948) | Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved April 25, 2020 .
  2. ^ Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. 1000 biographies in words and pictures . Sebastian Lux Verlag , Munich 1963, p. 58.
  3. ↑ Hans Peter Hahn: Ethnology: An introduction . Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-518-73392-9 ( google.de [accessed April 25, 2020]).
  4. ↑ Antrosio, Jason. 2013. “When Culture Looks Like Race: Dobu & Reification.” Living Anthropologically, 2013/2019 /
  5. ↑ Antrosio, Jason. 2013. "Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict (1934) wins Jared Diamond (2012)." Living Anthropologically, 2013 ,
  6. ↑ In today's scientific debate, mainly because of the “relativistic self-contradiction”, cultural relativistic standpoints are mostly no longer justifiable - cf. Susanne Rippl, Christian Seipel: Methods of cross-cultural social research. An introduction. , VS Verlag, 2007, p. 54 f.
  7. ↑ Helmut E. Lück: History of Psychology. (= Urban paperbacks ). 3. Edition. Kohlhammer, 2002, p. 42.
  8. ^ Reo F. Fortune: The Sorcerers of Dobu: the social anthropology of the Dobu islanders of the western Pacific . Introduction by Bronisław Malinowski . Dutton, New York 1963 (first published in 1932)
  9. ↑ See also: Nihonjinron .
  10. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 (PDF) . Retrieved October 11, 2015.
  11. ↑ Peter Burschel: In the beginning was Ruth Benedict, in: Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte als Anthropologie, ed. by Peter Burschel. Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2017. pp. 7–10.
personal data
SURNAME Benedict, Ruth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Benedict, Ruth Fulton (full name); Singleton, Anne (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH September 17, 1948
Place of death new York