Ruth Benedict A Humanist in Anthropology

Margaret Mead, America's most famous anthropologist, offers an intimate portrait of her long-time colleague and friend, Ruth Benedict. The first met when Mead was Benedict's student at Barnard in the 1920s; their professional association and their friendship were close and lasting. Beginning with Benedict's early life, Mead discusses her long struggle, as a woman, to attain an identity of her own, her early interests as a writer and poet, and her reasons for laying aside poetry for full-time scholarship. She grappled with the problems of a middle-class marriage and suburban household and eventually broke away to establish herself as a scholar and writer of distinction. As an anthropologist, her fame spread far beyond her profession with the publication of her first book, Patterns of Culture. With the coming of World War II, Benedict shifted her attention to an anthropological study of contemporary, highly developed cultures. The culmination of this interest was the publication of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and the establishment of the Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures project, a broad-based interdisciplinary research project which she headed until her untimely death in 1948. Complementing the biography are seven selections from Benedict's writings which show the range of her thought as well as the beauty of her writing, including her lecture as retiring President of the American Anthropological Association.--From publisher description.