SOURCE: "Anthropology for the Common Man," in American Anthropologist, Vol. 49, No. 1, 1947, pp. 84-90.

In the following essay, Williams reviews the mass-market edition ofPatterns of Culture, providing an introduction to the methodology and principles that are central to this work.

Publication of Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture in a 25 cent edition is an extremely important event. What it means is no less than this: Anthropology has now become available to the man on the street.

What is it that has now become popularly available? Great interest will attach, for one thing, to Dr. Benedict's colorful and suggestive use of the concepts "Apollonian" and "Dionysian." People interested in their "complexes" (and that includes almost everybody!) will derive pleasure and profit from her shrewd application of psychoanalysis to anthropology. But there can be little doubt that overriding contribution of Patterns of Culture is the liberalizing tradition of the science, the tradition...