Benedict, Ruth

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, she enrolled in the anthropology department at Columbia University. In 1923 she earned a doctorate under the aegis of Franz Boas.

On field trips to the Pueblo Indians between 1924 and 1926, Benedict elaborated on ideas about religion that she had formulated in prose sketches, poetry, and early anthropological writings. The significance of Zuni theocracy and ceremonialism is conveyed in her Patterns of Culture (1934). Through the 1930s, Benedict taught at Columbia, edited the Journal of American Folk Lore, and began to compare myths employed in primitive societies with the dreams of utopia current in complex societies. During World War II, at the Office of War Information, Benedict was assigned to work on Japan, a society whose beliefs and behaviors contrasted sharply with those of her own society. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword was published in 1946; Benedict died two years later.

According to Benedict, religion stems from human perception of a "wondrous power, a voltage with which the universe is believed to be charged" ("Religion," General Anthropology, p. 630). In an attempt to manipulate this power, people invent practices and accompanying beliefs; these constitute religion. People perceive "extraordinary power" either as a property of things (mana) or as analogous to human will and intention (animism). Each perception produces a distinct dogma and practice.

Benedict's interpretation centered on the individual, who needs reassurance and the security of knowing he or she can influence their own fate. Such psychological factors shape the universal elements of religion: vision, ceremonialism, ethical sanction, and dogma. All of these guide the individual through known and unknown forces. Because Benedict argued that religions exist to comfort human beings, she rejected the "cold," distant Christian God, the absolutist "good versus evil" of Western religions, and the abstract theologies of most stratified, literate societies. The Zuni religion was her model: gods resemble humans, humans dance as gods, religion is down-to-earth and sensual.

Religions also, in Benedict's view, express human imaginativeness. The capacity to envision a world beyond the ordinary provides the content of religion; in religion, humans symbolize their highest ideals. Whatever the precise form—quest, prayer, poem—dreaming represents an imaginative redoing of reality that can direct social change.

Benedict assumed that the human urge to control daily events precipitates fantasies, which are elaborate, imaginative transformations of culturally available means and ends. Her argument about religions echoes her theory of myth: Just as myths give the plain details of everyday life an extraordinary character, so religion accords the mundane daydream a supernatural quality. The impulse to alter present conditions expands into a "desire to remodel the universe," although Benedict did not outline the process. An attempt to manipulate the "forces of the universe" is, by her definition, religious.

For Benedict, the dream had to be tied to reality. Cut loose from substantive, secular concerns, dream becomes delusion and the seed of mass deception. Benedict offered no way of ensuring the link to reality except her own faith that individual demands and the daily pressures of existence keep religions accountable. Reflecting human vulnerability and creativeness, religion is also a "technique for success" and a mode of survival. A religion that failed to perform these functions, Benedict hoped, would be rejected. This point illustrates a movement typical of Benedict's anthropology, from the psychological to the cultural: individual need leads to social phenomenon.

Benedict's view of religion fitted her humanistic and relativistic anthropology. Humanism provided the universal aspect: human response to perception of a "wondrous power" is an attempt to control and to comprehend this power. The one impulse issues in acts (prayer, ritual, liturgy), and the other issues in articulation (symbols, myths, theologies). Relativism emerged in her claim that religious content must be tied to the stuff of everyday life. The diversity of religions proves how thoroughly perceptions of the extraordinary are linked to the ordinary; the "supernatural" (or spiritual) has no meaning apart from the "natural" (for Benedict, the "cultural").

Although her writings do not offer a fully developed theory of religion, Benedict does provide insight into human religiosity. The humility, imaginativeness, pragmatism, and hope in humans gave birth to religions. In freeing religion from a specific kind of behavior and content, Benedict offered a concept with cross-cultural application. Her statements on religion reiterated her general anthropological theory: shared dilemmas of human existence produce a variety of cultural solutions.

My book Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia, 1983) contains a bibliography including all of Benedict's published writings, archival sources, and works of significance to her anthropology, as well as secondary sources relevant to her life and works. Here follows an annotated list of Benedict's more important works.

The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America. Menasha, Wis., 1923. Benedict's dissertation was a comparative discussion of the guardian spirit complex in North American Indian tribes. She explored notions of "vision," the links of vision to everyday life, and the importance of imagination. She also showed how borrowed traits are altered to fit an existing culture.

Tales of the Cochiti Indians. Washington, D.C., 1931. A collection of myths and tales from a Pueblo tribe, the volume anticipated Benedict's theory, articulated in later works, that myths and tales are two sides of one coin. The volume also contains an early version of the "compensation" theory she later outlined in Zuni Mythology.

Patterns of Culture. Boston, 1934. Benedict's best-known book presents portraits of Zuni, Dobu, and Kwakiutl cultures in order to urge changes in contemporary American culture. Saying that "culture is personality writ large," she argued that cultures acquire personality traits, that individuals are "molded" to their cultures, and that conformity can be variously suppressive of individual expression in different societies.

Zuni Mythology. 2 vols. New York, 1935. The introduction to and summary of these two volumes explicated a theory of myth. For Benedict, myths are "compensatory," a way of making up for the constraints and the failures of everyday life. Myths are also "wishes" for a better social order and for a "redesigned universe." The former she called "tales" and the latter, because of their religious content, "myths." The volumes contain a large number of Zuni stories.

"Religion." In General Anthropology, edited by Franz Boas. Boston, 1938. In this chapter of Boas's text, Benedict presented her theory of religion. The chapter is not entirely satisfactory; she focuses less on religious phenomena than on individual psychology and cultural diversity. The attempt to develop a cross-cultural definition of religion somewhat weakens the explanatory force of her theory.

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Boston, 1946. This book, the product of inquiries made during World War II, is an elegant portrait of Japanese society and individuals. Benedict's discussions of honor, debt, obligation, and childrearing are still classic, and her evocation of a unique Japanese "personality" has not been equaled even by anthropologists who have done the fieldwork Benedict could not do for her study.

Babcock, Barbara A. "Not in the Absolute Singular." In Women Writing Culture, edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, pp. 104–130. Berkeley, Calif., 1995.

Caffrey, Margaret M. Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land. Austin, Tex., 1989.

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