Table of Contents

 

 

Table of Contents Main Points Key Figures Ruth Benedict Margaret Mead Key Texts Patterns of Culture Coming of Age in Samoa Critiques A Marxist Critique of Culture and Personality An Interactionist Critique of Culture and Personality

 

 

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Main Points

 

“We must understand the individual as living in his culture; and the culture as lived by individuals.” (Franz Boas, 1934)^[1]

 

Culture and Personality, also known as Psychological Anthropology, was one of the earliest intellectual schools of anthropology. It emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, under the influence of Franz Boas, and strived to explore the relationships between the individual, personality, and culture. The underlying questions were: what makes a culture what it is? And how to account for the differences found from one society to another? Mostly a reaction against cultural evolutionist theories prevalent in the discipline at this time, this school of thought, after Boas, refuted the idea according to which differences observed between cultures could be explained by those cultures’ supposed divergent positions on the universal scale on human evolution.^[2]

 

In the continuity of Franz Boas’s anthropology, the students of Culture and Personality all emphasized, rather than biological determinism, the superiority of education and the environment in the construction of the individual as member of a society. As a consequence, environmental rather than hereditary factors could account for cultural differences.^[3] The concept of enculturation, “the process by which culture is learned and transmitted across the generations,”^[4] was central to their work. The tenants of Culture and Personality insisted on the plasticity of human nature^[5], a characteristic which enables any individual to develop a certain behavior according to his cultural surrounding, and which accounts for differences found in various social groups.

 

If Franz Boas’s anthropological views represent the basis of Culture and Personality, however, it was his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict that came to explicate their schooling and make themselves famous in regards to Anthropology as a whole.

 

Coming of Age in Samoa is the result of Mead’s first field research, and can be seen as the manifesto of Culture and Personality.^[6] The author focuses on the liminal period between girlhood and womanhood in the South Pacific islands of Samoa, and contrasted it with the troublesome, stressful stage adolescence constituted in North America. Mead demonstrated that the sometimes chaotic passage from girlhood to womanhood in Victorian American had no natural, physiological or hereditary basis.^[7] She thus pointed to the fact that differences in childhood inevitably enhance differences in adolescence and, later, in adult life. In so doing, Mead established a correlation between child-rearing and adult personality and insisted on the constructed aspects of norms and deviances.

 

Published six years later, Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) can be considered the second mainstay of Psychological Anthropology. If both Mead and Benedict were interested in the correlations between culture and personality, Benedict’s approach differs significantly from Mead’s: while the latter anthropologist attempted to explain the mechanisms through which an individual’s personality is determined by its cultural environment, the former, convinced that cultures are “personality writ large,”^[8] attempted to uncover “the personalities of whole cultures.”^[9] In Patterns of Culture, Benedict thus confronted the distinct personalities of three cultural groups - the Zuñi (American Southwest), the Kwakiutl (Pacific Northwest), and the Dobuans (South Pacific) – and attributed a dominant psychological feature to each of them. In a 1959 preface to Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, Margaret Mead introduces the book as

 

the best introduction we have to the widening of horizons by a comparative study of different cultures, through which we can see our own socially transmitted customary behavior set beside that of other and strangely different peoples.^[10]

 

Both Mead’s and Benedict’s books received a huge success and were widely read at their publication, constituting the very first anthropological works successful in addressing to a nonanthropological public and in conveying Boas’ views of culture beyond academic spheres.

 

Culture and Personality contributed to defend what we would today call constructionism: the recognition that a large part of culture - our behavior, our worldview, our gender-based performances, our sexual practices, and our conceptions of what is normal and deviant, acceptable and unacceptable – is constructed, acquired through enculturation, rather than natural or biological. Culture and Personality also allowed to develop, both within and outside of the academy, the concept of cultural relativism, according to which “it is inappropriate to use outside standards to judge behavior in a given society”^[11]. By focusing on the culturally-constructed conceptions of deviance and norms, Culture and Personality uncovered the relative aspect of American values, long taken for granted both by the American public and the 19^th century tenants of cultural evolutionism.

 

 

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Key Figures

 

Ruth Benedict

Born: June 5,1887

Died: September 17, 1948

 

Education

BA English Literature at Vassar College (1909)

PhD Anthropology at Columbia University (1923)

 

Publications

Patterns of Culture (1934)

Zuni Mythology (1935)

The Races of Mankind (1940)

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture(1946)

 

Biography

     Ruth Fulton is believed to have been born in New York City, however Margaret Mead claimed that she was born in a small farm town in upper New York State^[12]. Her childhood was apparently difficult: she lost her father at a very young age. Her mother was a librarian and school teacher and had to care for Ruth and her younger sister. At the beginning of childhood schooling, Ruth was discovered to be partially deaf, adding more stress to her and her family.

     She entered Vassar College in 1905, and received a degree in English Literature. After college, she traveled and did charity work. Then, she ended up in Los Angeles as a schoolteacher, living with her sister. Where she met and married Stanley Benedict. The Benedicts then moved back to New York City. She started taking classes at New School for Social Research, where she found her passion for anthropology^[13]. Afterwards, she gained her PhD in Anthropology at Columbia under the tutelage of Franz Boas one of the fathers of modern Anthropology. 

     Ruth Benedict's main body of work dealt with cultural themes and patterns. She thought  that the civilized societies have been so affected by cultural diffusion from each other that underlying patterns are hard to trace^[14]. However autonomous primitive societies have distinctive personalities and rituals, therefore we can discover the underlying "values of existence.^[15]" Ruth Benedict said "we may know all about the distribution of a tribe's form of marriage, dance rituals… yet understand nothing of the culture as a whole which has used these elements to its own purpose."^[16] These elements that she speaks of are key concepts in her book Patterns of Culture. We can not understand societies just by observing their "institutions" without knowledge of their inner moral fibers. In Patterns of Culture,she compares the cultural patterns of two northern American Indian groups and an Indian group living off the coast of New Guinea. She compares one group's idea of a good man for example, to another's and finds that they are drastically different. 

     These differences lie in the culture's value system."Our human cultural heritage, for better or worse, is not biologically transmitted."^[17] We are not born with a biological set of values that is hereditarily passed down to us. However all humans have practices, ways, social understanding, and traditions that they participate in automatically. These values are transmitted by the interaction between an individual and the culture of a community in which the individual was raised. Humans within a community have the same core morals, that makes them part of the culture. The same thing that makes individuals part of a culture can also alienate them if they reject the preconceived values of the culture.

Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture was a very successful book that sold over 1.6 million copies^[18]. Afterwards, she continued to write books and teach at Columbia. After the second World War she wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese culture it was a study of core values in Japan and attempted to explain Japan's actions during the war. In it, Benedict made some surprisingly accurate predictions of the post war occupation^[19]. She died on September 17, 1948, two months after being appointed full professor at Columbia.

 

 

Margaret Mead

 (December 16, 1901 - Novermber 15, 1978)

 

 

 

Magaret Mead was arguably one of the most influential contributers to the field of anthropology of the 20th century. Her research helped broaden interest in anthropology and make its practice more viable to those interested not only in America but in the western world. Her research, while provocative and controversial at times, expanded awareness about the concept of sexuality in far away lands that had a direct impact on changing and influencing sexual revolution taking place in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Her impact continues on today in part to her extensive collection of writings including 44 books and over 1000 papers on primitive societies and contemporary culture. ^[20]

 

 

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     Childhood and Early Life, and Education

 

 

Magaret Mead was born on December 16, 1901, in Philadelphia Pennsylania, to Edward Sherwood Mead (an economist and Emily Fogg Mead (a sociologist). ^[24] Mead was the first of five children born into a Quaker farm family and grew up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  ^[25]Mead's family moved around a lot to different Quaker farms, and due to this she went back and forth between home-schooling and traditional schools.^[26] When Mead was a child her younger sister Katherine died. This was very traumatic for Mead who thought and dreamed of her siter that she had named for years to come.^[27] 

 

Mead entered academia in 1919 at DePauw University. She attended here for one year and after went on to complete her Bachelors Degree, which she completed in 1923. She then went to Columbia, where she worked closely with Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth Benedict and where she completed her masters degree in 1924 and later her Ph.D in 1929. ^[28] 

 

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     Personal Life

 

Mead was married three different times. She first married Luther Sheeleigh Cressman, an Episcopal priest and later a sociologist and archeologist on September 3, 1923. They divorced five years later in 1928. Mead then married Reo Franklin Fortune, also an anthropologist, on October 8, 1928. They were married for seven years, divorcing in 1935. Her last marriage was to Gregory Bateson, another anthropologist. They married March 13, 1936. This was her longest marriage lasting 14 years and ending in 1950. They had one child, Mary Catherine Bateson, in 1939, who is also an anthropologist. ^[29] 
This was her most cherished marriage and the man she loved the most. Mead was heartbroken when he left her. They remained loving friends with Mead always keeping his picture by her bedside.  ^[30] 

 

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     Research and Work

 

While working on her masters degree, Mead traveled to Polynesia in 1925. She set out on what she called "a giant rescue operation." Her mission was to study primitive cultures before they disappeared. She stayed for six weeks in a ramshackle hotel where she began her work documenting and recording the study of adolescence among the Polynesians. After she moved to the island of Ta'u where she was the only whit person besides the family of a naval pharmacist. She stayed for nine months and documented the life of a Samoan woman through shared experience and interviewing and talking with 68 Samoan females betweeen the ages of 8 and 20. The conclusions of her work here set out to prove that teen angst was cultural and not biological. Mead found the carefree Samoan's practice of sexual liberation and freedom before marriage as an admirable quality. ^[31] 

 

Following her research in Polynesia, Mead returned to the United States and began working as assistant curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural  history in 1926. After marrying her second husband in New Zealand in 1928 Mead and Fortune traveled to the central island of the Great Admirality archipelago, Manus, and settled in a village called Peri. They began research here studying the minds of primitive children. The outcome of their fieldwork revealed to Mead that the differences between "civilized" cutlures and "primitive" ones was greatly exaggerated and that human nature was essentially malleable.

 

After their research was completed Mead and Fortune returned to New York and settled down.  At the same time Meads first book, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization was becoming very popular. In 1930 Mead traveled to Nebraska to study the Omaha indians, but was devastated when she found that such a rich culture and virtually been eliminated. ^[32] In recent years since Mead's death, some criticism of her research in Samoa has been questioned, particularly by anthropologist Derek Freeman, saying she had coaxed the answers she was looking for from the people she studied. The conclusion has been reached that the truth will probably never be known, but Mead's methods and influence on anthropology are undoubted. ^[33]

 

In 1931 Mead traveled to New Guinea, where she was left by her boat that brought her at a small village called Alitoa. It turned out to be more than worth it however as the island had some very interesting cultures to interact with and study. Here she found a group she called the Arapesh that was basically pacifists. While the did engage in warfare from time to time, the mostly focussed on sharing garden plots, working together, and an egalitarian method of child-rearing where all community members took a part in raising the groups young. On the same island, another tribe, the Mundugumor, was extremely violent. She wrote, "small children of eleven and twelve had all taken part in cannibal feasts. ^[34] Her work in this region would later become her next book, Sex and Temperment in Three Primitive Societies. Some of her work here became a major influence on feminist movements in the west when she reavealed that amongst the Cahmbri Lake Region in Papa New Guinea, women were the leaders of communities rather than men. This was in stark contrast to much of the rest of the Melanesian region. ^[35] 

 

In 1946 Mead took a job as the curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. She held this position until 1969. During the same time from 1954- 1978 she was an adjunct professor at The New School and Columbia University. In 1968 she became the Professor of Anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Science at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus. She had founded the anthropology department here, following Ruth Benedict's example. Her research focussed on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. She held this position until 1970 ^[36] 

 

In 1960 she served as the President of the American Anthropological Association. She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science throughout the 1970s, including President in 1975 and Chair of Executive Committees of the board of directors in 1976.^[37] 

 

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     Students Influenced by Mead

 

One student Mead had a particular influence on was Rhoda Metraux. She and Mead published several books together and numerous articles throughout the 1950s and into the late 1970s. The were very close professionally and some think even may have had a romantic relationship. They lived together in Greenwich Village in New York from 1955- 1966. They then shared an apartment together in New York from 1966- 1978. Their best known work is a book called A Way of Seeing. ^[38] 

 

 

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Key Texts

 

Patterns of Culture

 

Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, published in 1934, is a seminal text in the Culture and Personality school of cultural anthropology.  In it, Benedict explores the complex relationship between culture and the individual; she argues that, “society in its full sense as we have discussed it in this volume is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it."^[39]  The book is centered around a comparison of three societies: the Pueblo in the American Southwest, the Kwakiutl of western Canada, and the Dobu of Melanesia.  Ultimately, Benedict concludes that it is that unique amalgam of individual traits, encouraged implicitly and explicitly by a society, that defines each human culture.^[40]

Franz Boas’ theory of cultural relativism also permeates Benedict’s writing.  Benedict argues that anthropology itself is impossible if one cannot lay aside his or her preferential weighting of one culture over the other.^[41]  She goes so far as to chastise Western society’s pomposity, writing “so that today... we are still preoccupied with the uniqueness, not of the human institutions of the world at large... but with our own institutions and achievements, our own civilization."^[42]  This culturally relativistic viewpoint distinguishes Benedict as an anthropologist of the modern age, and therefore makes her work valid and reliable to this day.

 

 

Coming of Age in Samoa

Margaret Mead’s ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928. Mead’s anthropological question, that sent her to the field in Samoa, was is adolescence a period characterized by stress and turbulence worldwide; is adolescence biologically inherent or culturally determined. A commonly accepted definition of adolescence in the United States “was characterized as the period in which idealism flowered and rebellion against authority waxed strong, a period during which difficulties and conflicts were absolutely inevitable".^[43] Mead questioned whether it might be the American environment that created the stress of adolescence, and thus she traveled to Samoa in order to test her hypothesis. Mead chose Samoan girls as the subjects of her study because they belong to a "primitive" and "simple" culture that is historically different than the United States and thus has developed an entirely separate culture.^[44] She focused on learning the way of life for adolescent girls mainly because she had greater access to female life. 

 

Mead explains that as children, Samoan girls are taught to view boys as enemies but as they finish puberty they start to develop relations. The book seems to hint that these relations are rather casual until old age or marriage.^[45]The community educates the girls more about sex and personality than about the organization of their community. For example, by the time of puberty a girl has seen deaths, births and miscarriages but is unable to correctly change verbs into different tenses or speak the courtesy language.^[46]

 

Mead concluded that adolescence (and human behavior, more generally) is cultural determined. While Mead’s study is a widely read anthropological work it is not without criticism. At the time of publication, it shocked the Western view of culture and was thus read with caution. More recently, Dr. Derek Freeman sparked a controversy over Mead’s method of fieldwork in 1983 claiming that Mead's fieldwork “is a sign of the profession's maturity,” meaning that she used early methods of fieldwork, which compared to today's methods are rudimentary.^[47]

 

 

 

 

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Critiques

A Marxist Critique of Culture and Personality

      Marxist approaches differ from the Culture and Personality school in that they do not agree that society shapes individual personalities in the same manner. Rather, Marxist approaches, and other approaches such as race psychology, believe that society shapes personality based on your position (socio-cultural, economic, racial, etc.) within that society.^[48] Cultural materialism also believes that the infrastructure of the society determines the structure and superstructure. This means that the most specific aspects of the culture like the basic biological needs of the people and the demography determine the higher and broader aspects of the culture.^[49] 

     An example of how this critique came about can be seen if we view Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age is Samoa from the point of view of a Marxist. In Mead’s study all 25 of the subjects were treated as though they had been exposed to the same culture and society.^[50] A Marxist would argue that this is not a suitable sample since girls of different classes were exposed to different aspects of society and culture. They would argue that in order to compare the subjects they would all need to come from the same class. Also in Coming of Age is Samoa Mead compared the Samoan education system to the American education system. But the “American” education system she used was really only the middle-class system, which she never specifies or explains. A Marxist would argue that the middle-class system of education cannot be generalized to how all Americans are educated.^[51]

     Another example of a Marxist critique of Culture and Personality can be found in the critiques of Ruth Benedict’s “national character” approach to studying other cultures such as the Japanese. Other anthropologists claimed that her approach was both subjective and did not pay enough attention to class differences when characterizing other cultures.^[52]

 

An Interactionist Critique of Culture and Personality

     A major critique of the Culture and Personality approach was that it was too homogenizing. It tends to overlook internal differences between individuals and subgroups within cultures. Erving Goffman, who founded the Interactionist approach, proposed that people reveal different aspects of their personality in different situations. Goffman also proposed that people may project false or idealistic versions of themselves into society, rather than being completely honest. This differed from Culture and Personality as well, since culture and personality never looked at whether deceit occurred in how people presented their personality. Goffman emphasized that people consciously select what roles to play in what social situation and thus manipulate the situation.^[53] 

Culture and Personality did not account for this possibility; it focused on child rearing strategies and society as having ingrained personality into an individual. Thus, it never considered that an individual had the power to manipulate their own personality to only show certain aspects depending on the situation.

      We can see an example of where this critique might have come from by looking at Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. In Mead’s work she describes how Samoan wives obey their husbands in the household. However, she does not observe the women in other situations and places to see how they may rebel or subvert their husband’s authority. She sees only the aspects of the women’s personality that they display in the home, not those aspects they may display elsewhere in other situations.^[54] Thus observing and recording an incomplete record of the women’s personalities.