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December 23, 2017 - January 30, 2018
Benedict’s poetic evocation of non-Western cultures invited me into a discipline that valued cultural difference and called for a vision of humanity that celebrated the broad spectrum of human behavior and the varied repertoire of cultures across the world.
One of the most enduring metaphors used by Benedict in Patterns of Culture is that of a great arc across which range the possible interests provided by the environment, the age cycle, and human activities. Each culture selects from that arc of possibilities, choosing to emphasize one or several, giving that culture its particular pattern.
As Benedict says, “Its identity as a culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this arc. . . . Each from the point of view of another ignores fundamentals and exploits irrelevancies.”
The point was to value, not to judge.
She was especially attuned to the role of the deviant, the individual who does not fit into the dominant cultural pattern.
She was particularly concerned with the extent to which one culture could find a place for extremes of behavior—in the mystic, the seer, the artist—which another culture branded as abnormal or worthless.
the widening of cultural definitions might enrich our culture and lighten the load of rejection under which the cultural deviant now labors.
the genius of the culture, a knowledge of the attitudes controlling individual and group behaviour. Dr. Benedict calls the genius of culture its configuration.
It is not historical except in so far as the general configuration, as long as it lasts, limits the directions of change that remain subject to it. In comparison to changes of content of culture the configuration has often remarkable permanency.
the anthropologist, our customs and those of a New Guinea tribe are two possible social schemes for dealing with a common problem, and in so far as he remains an anthropologist he is bound to avoid any weighting of one in favour of the other.
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.
The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.
The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration.
Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people’s minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief over against our neighbour’s superstition.
Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known. It has standardized itself over most of the globe, and we have been led, therefore, to accept a belief in the uniformity of human behaviour that under other circumstances would not have arisen.
Western civilization has had all its inventions in transportation and all its far-flung commercial arrangements to back up its great dispersion, and it is easy to understand historically how this came about.
The psychological consequences of this spread of white culture have been out of all proportion to the materialistic. This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples; it has given to our culture a massive universality that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable.
we defend, attempting always to identify our own local ways of behaving with Behaviour, or our own socialized habits with Human Nature.
He does not reckon with the fact of other social arrangements where all the factors, it may be, are differently arranged. He does not reckon, that is, with cultural conditioning.
A very little acquaintance with other conventions, and a knowledge of how various these may be, would do much to promote a rational social order.
Modern existence has thrown many civilizations into close contact, and at the moment the overwhelming response to this situation is nationalism and racial snobbery. There has never been a time when civilization stood more in need of individuals who are genuinely culture-conscious, who can see objectively the socially conditioned behaviour of other peoples without fear and recrimination.
Man is not committed in detail by his biological constitution
With their comparative isolation, many primitive regions have had centuries in which to elaborate the
He straddled two cultures whose values and ways of thought were incommensurable.
Aspects of life that seem to us most important have been passed over with small regard by peoples whose culture, oriented in another direction, has been far from poor.
In culture too we must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the environment or by man’s various activities. A culture that capitalized even a considerable proportion of these would be as unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks, all the glottal stops, all the labials, dentals, sibilants, and gutturals from voiceless to voiced and from oral to nasal. Its identity as a culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this arc. Every human society everywhere has made such selection in its cultural
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we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.
Becoming traditional, they would be given the same richness of content, the same importance and value,
No man can thoroughly participate in any culture unless he has been brought up and has lived according to its forms, but he can grant to other cultures the same significance to their participants which he recognizes in his own.
Racial differences and prestige prerogatives have so merged among Anglo-Saxon peoples that we fail to separate biological racial matters from our most socially conditioned prejudices.
All the miscellaneous behaviour directed toward getting a living, mating, warring, and worshipping the gods, is made over into consistent patterns in accordance with unconscious canons of choice that develop within the culture.
A few cultures understood as coherent organizations of behaviour are more enlightening than many touched upon only at their high spots. The relation of motivations and purposes to the separate items of cultural behaviour at birth, at death, at puberty, and at marriage can never be made clear by a comprehensive survey of the world. We must hold ourselves to the less ambitious task, the many-sided understanding of a few cultures.
Even given the freest scope by their institutions, men are never inventive enough to make more than minute changes. From the point of view of an outsider the most radical innovations in any culture amount to no more than a minor revision, and it is a commonplace that prophets have been put to death for the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Facile generalizations about the integration of culture are most dangerous in field-work. When one is mastering the language and all the idiosyncrasies of behaviour of an esoteric culture, preoccupation with its configuration may well be an obstacle to a genuine understanding. The field-worker must be faithfully objective. He must chronicle all the relevant behaviour, taking care not to select according to any challenging hypothesis the facts that will fit a thesis.
group phenomena must be studied if we are to understand the history of human behaviour, and individual psychology cannot of itself account for the facts with which we are confronted.
The difficulty with naive interpretations of culture in terms of individual behaviour is not that these interpretations are those of psychology, but that they ignore history and the historical process of acceptance or rejection of traits.
social conduct even in a selected society is ‘not simply the expression of a fixed mechanism that predetermines to a specific mode of conduct, but rather a set of tendencies aroused in variable ways by the specific problem that confronts us.’
The cultural pattern of any civilization makes use of a certain segment of the great arc of potential human purposes and motivations,
The great arc along which all the possible human behaviours are distributed is far too immense and too full of contradictions for any one culture to utilize even any considerable portion of it. Selection is the first requirement. Without selection no culture could even achieve intelligibility,
Nothing could be more unfortunate than an effort to characterize all cultures as exponents of a limited number of fixed and selected types.
Mourning, or marriage, or puberty rites, or economics are not special items of human behaviour, each with their own generic drives and motivations which have determined their past history and will determine their future, but certain occasions which any society may seize upon to express its important cultural intentions. The significant sociological unit, from this point of view, therefore, is not the institution but the cultural configuration.
As we become increasingly culture-conscious, we shall be able to isolate the tiny core that is generic in a situation and the vast accretions that are local and cultural and man-made. The fact that these accretions are not inevitable consequences of the situation as such does not make them easier to change or less important in our behaviour. Indeed they are probably harder to change than we have realized.
There is, however, one difficult exercise to which we may accustom ourselves as we become increasingly culture-conscious. We may train ourselves to pass judgment upon the dominant traits of our own civilization. It is difficult enough for anyone brought up under their power to recognize them. It is still more difficult to discount, upon necessity, our predilection for them. They are as familiar as an old loved homestead. Any world in which they do not appear seems to us cheerless and untenable. Yet it is these very traits which by the operation of a fundamental cultural process are most often
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Yet the dominant traits of our civilization need special scrutiny. We need to realize that they are compulsive, not in proportion as they are basic and essential in human behaviour, but rather in the degree to which they are local and overgrown in our own culture.
Society in its full sense as we have discussed it in this volume is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.
vast proportion of all individuals who are born into any society always and whatever the idiosyncrasies of its institutions, assume, as we have seen, the behaviour dictated by that society. This fact is always interpreted by the carriers of that culture as being due to the fact that their particular institutions reflect an ultimate and universal sanity. The actual reason is quite different. Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born.
The issue in psychiatry has been too often confused by starting from a fixed list of symptoms instead of from the study of those whose characteristic reactions are denied validity in their society.
The fact that the Dobuan could not function in his culture was not a consequence of the particular responses that were congenial to him, but of the chasm between them and the cultural pattern.
They illustrate the dilemma of the individual whose congenial drives are not provided for in the institutions of his culture. This dilemma becomes of psychiatric importance when the behaviour in question is regarded as categorically abnormal in a society.
When the homosexual response is regarded as a perversion, however, the invert is immediately exposed to all the conflicts to which aberrants are always exposed. His guilt, his sense of inadequacy, his failures, are consequences of the disrepute which social tradition visits upon him, and few people can achieve a satisfactory life unsupported by the standards of their society. The adjustments that society demands of them would strain any man’s vitality, and the consequences of this conflict we identify with their homosexuality.
