Benedict, Ruth (1887-1948)

US anthropologist whose Patterns of Culture (1934) had a major influence on the ‘culture and personality’ research tradition of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Benedict argued that different cultures could be characterized in terms of different personality types.

Benedict saw individual cultures selectively elaborating some human personality styles at the expense of others. Each culture was thus a projection of the personalities of those who created it.

Benedict studied English at Vassar College 1905-09 and studied anthropology in the 1920s at Columbia University under Franz Boas. She conducted fieldwork in the southwestern USA and in Patterns of Culture she compared several cultures by assigning each a personality type. The Zuni, who distrusted individualism, she called ‘Apollonian’; other North American Indians were classed as ‘Dionysian’; the Kwakiutl exhibited a ‘megalomaniac’ personality type; and the Dobuans of Melanesia, because they used magic, were ‘paranoid’. Such classifications, however, were severely criticized and were a major obstacle to the acceptance of her ideas. Her book Chrysanthemum and the Sword 1946 was influential in Japan and with those who worked with the Japanese after World War II.