It is never specifically cited, nor does it make historical sense. The Reddit post argues that “Ruth Benedict never said it, not in any of her published writings.
She asked me if I knew and pointed out a Reddit post about the quote. Archaeologist Meg Conkey told me recently that she too like the quote, but was unsure of its origins. I did notice, however, that while the quote appeared on a lot of websites, there was never any specific source cited. I added it to my e-mail signature sometime over the summer-a place that I usually reserve for my contact info alone. Specifically too, that quotation has resonated with a lot of people, myself included. One version of the popular Ruth Benedict internet meme. Simon Kuper, writing in The Financial Times, has dubbed Barack Obama the “anthropologist-in-chief” and a number of others have pointed out that President Obama’s interest in anthropology has tracked a growing interest in our discipline. The remark, however, doesn’t specifically attribute the quote to Benedict. The President referred to his own mother’s training as an anthropologist, as well as Ghani’s background. “The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences”Īlong with a presence on the quotation websites, this quote has made the rounds as an internet meme (framed against a nice photo of Benedict) and, perhaps most famously, was featured in remarks made by President Barack Obama during a press conference with Afghan President Ghani on March 24, 2015. One of these quotes has gotten a lot of attention recently-here it is:
Perhaps not surprisingly, some of Benedict’s more pithy insights appear on internet sites dedicated to quotation. Likewise, Alex Golub, in his blog Savage Minds, argues that Benedict’s concise prose presages today’s best blog writing. Antrosio’s satiric comparison specifically looks at Diamond and Benedict’s take on what traditional societies have to teach the Western world. Blogger Jason Antrosio, writing at Living Anthropologically, pits Benedict against social geographer Jared Diamond, arguing that Benedict did what Diamond does, only better, more eloquently, with at least as much erudition, more personally, and at least seventy-five years before Diamond. 1995 commemorative US postage stamp featuring Ruth Benedict.īenedict has fared pretty well in the internet age. She famously argued that anthropology needed both. Benedict wrote and talked about the paradigm shift in our field that she witnessed in the twentieth century as Boasian humanism gave way to scientific approaches. Biographies continue to appear, including two dual bios of Mead and Benedict. Mead wrote a marvelous biography of her friend that gives her impressions alongside published and unpublished works by Benedict. Benedict (1887-1948) is known for many things-she was a favorite student of anthropology icon Franz Boas, she conducted multidisciplinary work across anthropology, psychology, and social science, and was close friend and confidant of Margaret Mead.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE ABNORMAL RUTH BENEDICT PDF SERIES
Modern civilization, from this point of view, becomes not a necessary pinnacle of human achievement but one entry in a long series of possible adjustments.A quick Google search reveals that Ruth Benedict still looms large in the minds of contemporary anthropologists. Most of the simpler cultures did not gain the wide currency of the one which, out of our experience, we identify with human nature, but this was for various historical reasons, and certainly not for any that gives us as its carriers a monopoly of social good or of social sanity. In the higher cultures the standardization of custom and belief over a couple of continents has given a false sense of the inevitability of the particular forms that have gained currency, and we need to turn to a wider survey in order to check the conclusions we hastily base upon this near-universality of familiar customs. Dyaks and Hopis, Fijians and Yakuts are significant for psychological and sociological study because only among these simpler peoples has there been sufficient isolation to give opportunity for the development of localized social forms.
For such a study of diverse social orders primitive peoples fortunately provide a laboratory not yet entirely vitiated by the spread of a standardized worldwide civilization. Modern social anthropology has become more and more a study of the varieties and common elements of cultural environment and the consequences of these in human behavior.
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