The Science of Culture: The Bearing of Anthropology on Contemporary Thought, by Ruth Benedict, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

In this essay Benedict lays out the main arguments of anthropology: It is the study of ‘custom’ (or culture, as we might say today), not the study of ‘primitives.’ It is necessary because we are too socialized into our own customs to recognize them at work, and also because the spread of Western culture has made it harder and harder for Americans (and others) to encounter cultural difference. Humans are unique because our customs are learned rather than biologically inherited. There are no natural stages of evolution that all societies pass through, and it is not useful to argue that a custom exists in society because it fulfills a utilitarian need that society has.  this is true in a trivial sense, but the specific features culture traits are shaped by cultural patterns which shape behavior. There is no one true religion or spirituality, and cultures all explore different facets of a species-wide spiritual experience. The results of these realizations is a greater ability to view one’s culture objectively, a more tolerance for other ways of life, and a greater ability to appreciate the lives we build together as humans. Anthropology, then, helps humans live flourishing lives because it educates our faculties and gives us the ability to live emotional and mental lives that are flexible and have wide horizons.

Eighty five years later, most of Benedict’s conclusions stand intact. Of course, additional research has led us to revise some of her conclusions: we now know humans are much more like other animals, and that other animals are lot more like us. We are less confident that there is a universal experience of ‘the divine’ or ‘spirituality’ than Benedict was. And we know there is no necessary relationship between recognition between liberal values of tolerance and recognition of the arbitrary and conventional nature of our cultures. We are also less willing to pain indigenous people as caught in the grip of an unknown cultural pattern, obsessively elaborating it. Benedict overstates her case here (and also provides no scholarly references to back up her ethnographic claims!) and in doing so, makes indigenous people sound almost mentally ill.

These quibbles aside, however, it is striking how contemporary Benedict’s work feels. It is for this reason that I hope a contemporary readership will enjoy it.

This version of “The Science of Culture” is presented unaltered from the original article, which is reproduced in full. The bracketed numbers in the text indicate the pages of the original article. This is the first paper in the SMOPS which has reprinted a work that was originally under copyright but whose copyright has elapsed and was not renewed. These works, produced between 1923 and 1963, are central to the history of anthropology and I am excited to present more of them to you. I thank the special collection division of the Hamilton Library at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa for help in locating the original version of “The Science of Culture” and Project Gutenberg for providing the fell text of the U.S. Copyright Office’s copyright renewal records which were used to confirm the copyright status of this work.

I hope that this paper, like the others in this series, will help present anthropological theory in a form that is accessible to everyone. There is today a tremendous amount of material which is open access, but it is difficult to find, inconvenient to read, and many people do not know where to start looking for it. By curating a selection of important open access work, I hope to make open access resources better known and to raise awareness of the actual history of anthropological theory.

The Methods of Ethnology, by Franz Boas, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

In “Methods” Boas constructs a three way comparison between his own American approach and that of two other schools of thought found in Europe. The first school is what I will refer to as the “evolutionists,” who Boas also refers to as universalists, or theorists of “development by inner causes.” This positions hold that all societies evolve through set stages of development, and some are more ahead of others in this regard. The second school is, confusingly, called “diffusionism” or “world diffusionists” (the label I’ll use) which is similar to Boas’s diffusionism but distinct from it in key ways. World diffusion assumes that culture traits do not change over time, but diffuse from one central area across the entire globe. Thus Polynesian outrigger canoes, on this view, might originally be from Ancient Egypt and have over the course of thousands of years diffused to the Pacific.

Boas disagrees with both of these views. He argues that both of these positions make assumptions about human culture and then fit the evidence into those assumptions, rather than attempting to work inductively from the data to theory. Boas says that this act of theorizing is important, but cannot be done at the moment because we simply do not have enough data. This empiricism and skepticism for accepted narratives is still with us in anthropology.

It is also worth noting that Boas is also interested in process, change, and the dynamism of culture — another hallmark of our discipline. In fact Boas uses the term “dynamic” five times in this paper, and argues that “All cultural forms… appear in a constant state of flux and subject to fundamental modifications.” This is why world diffusionism cannot be correct — culture traits do not stay the same for thousands of years as they traverse the globe. So Boas is interested in diffusion, he just doesn’t think it takes the form that world diffusionists such as Elliot Smith believe it does.

Finally, Boas shares an interest with the evolutionists: the way in which ‘inner needs’ or ‘tendencies’ shape the way that culture traits which diffuse into an area are integrated into its culture. However, where evolutionists see all cultures as sharing the same developmental program, Boas believes each one has its own unique developmental urges — its own ‘configuration,’ as Ruth Benedict would call it. And indeed this is the basic vision of the Boasian program: ‘history’ (or historical processes) diffuses traits across the world, while ‘psychology’ (or cultural patterns) then integrate them into local cultural configurations.  This is why Boas points out the importance of studies of acculturation — something that would move to the forefront of anthropology in the years leading up to World War II.

“Methods” is a short piece, and I have given it a very light treatment. I have deleted extraneous phrases and qualifications which weigh down Boas’s prose. I have also cut Boas’s reference to scholars who are no longer widely read, while keeping citations of better-known scholars. My goal has been to give the reader a cleaner, more legible Boas to encounter, and of course to lead them back to the original text.

I hope that this paper, like the others in this series, will help present early anthropological theory in a form that is accessible to everyone. There is today a tremendous amount of material which is open access, but it is difficult to find, inconvenient to read, and many people do not know where to start looking for it. By curating a selection of important open access work, I hope to make open access resources better known and to raise awareness of the actual history of anthropological theory.

Savage Minds Occasional Paper Series #7: Anthropology and the Humanities by Ruth Benedict, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub