SOURCE: "Ruth Benedict and the Modernist Sensibility," in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, edited by Marc Manganaro, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 163-80.

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

In recent works, Michael Levenson (1984) and Kathryne Lindberg (1987) have charted the tension within literary modernism between the quest for self-expression and the desire to recover a viable tradition. Both critics, in strikingly different ways, have presented the dialogue and debate between Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (among others) as emblematic of the larger opposition of individuality and tradition, or deconstructive originality and cultural constraint. In my work on the literary endeavors of Boasian anthropologists, I have examined a similar tension in the development of a culture theory that could accommodate both cultural holism and human individuality. Using Levenson and Lindberg to reexamine an essay in which I compare...