The American cultural anthropologist Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887-1948) originated the configurational approach to culture. Her work has provided a bridge between the humanities and anthropology, as well as background for all later culture-personality...

Ruth Fulton Benedict--anthropologist, ethnographer, folklorist, and poet--is remembered today for her ability to popularize anthropology as cultural critique, her marriage of psychological studies and anthropology, her influential cultural relativist...

BENEDICT, RUTH (1887–1948) was an American cultural anthropologist. Ruth Fulton grew up in a Baptist household in New York State. After four years at Vassar (1905–1909), schoolteaching, and marriage to Stanley Rossiter Benedict in 1914,...

Ruth Benedict (born Ruth Fulton, June 5, 1887–September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist. She was born in New York City, and attended Vassar College, graduating in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, studying...

MEAD, MARGARET. Ruth Benedict: a humanist in anthropology. xlvi, 180 pp., illus., bibliogrs. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005. [pounds sterling]42.50 (cloth), [pounds sterling]16.00 (paper) Columbia University Press has reissued Margaret Mead's 1974 memoir of Ruth Benedict with her selected passages from...

YOUNG, VIRGINIA HEYER. Ruth Benedict: beyond relativity, beyond pattern. xii, 379 pp., bibliogr. London, Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2005. [pounds sterling]38.95 (cloth) It may seem odd that we are still talking about Ruth Benedict so many years after her death in 1948,...

Caffrey is an American anthropologist. In the following excerpt from her biography of Benedict, she assesses the impact that Patterns of Culture exerted on anthropology as a developing field of study.

Geertz is an American anthropologist whose numerous works focus on the cultures of Indonesian countries and reflect a method of study that combines various disciplines—including history, philosophy, psychology, and literary criticism—to analyse cultural structures and phenomena. Describing himself as an "interpretive social scientist," he is considered one of the most important figures in contemporary anthropology. In the following essay, Geertz examines Benedict's prose ...

In the following essay, Handler considers Benedict's anthropological writings as representative of a "modernist sensibility. 'I