Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, published the same year as Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, might have been called ‘Sex and Temperament, Economic Exchange, Religion, Food Production and Rivalry in Three Primitive Societies,’ for the two books had much in common.40 Benedict looked at the Zuni Indians of New Mexico (native Americans were called ‘Indians’ in those days, even by anthropologists), the Dobu of New Guinea, and the Kwakiutl, who lived on the Pacific coast of Alaska and Puget Sound. Here again large idiosyncrasies in culture were described. The Zuni were ‘a people who value sobriety and inoffensiveness above all other virtues,’ who placed great reliance on imitative magic: water was sprinkled on the ground to produce rain.41 Children were whipped ceremonially from time to time ‘to take off the bad happenings.’42 Ownership of property – in particular the sacred fetishes – was in the matrilineal line, and the dominant aspect of Zuni life, religion apart, was its polite orderliness, with individuality lost within the group. The Dobu, in contrast, were ‘lawless and treacherous’; ‘the social forms which obtain in Dobu put a premium on ill-will and treachery and make of them the recognised virtues of their society.’43 Faithfulness was not expected between husband and wife, broken marriages were ‘excessively common,’ and a special role was played by disease. If someone fell ill, it was because someone else willed it. Disease-charms were widely sold, and some individuals had a monopoly on certain diseases. In trade the highest value was put on cheating the other party. ‘The Dobu, therefore, is dour, prudish and passionate, consumed with jealousy and suspicion and resentment. Every moment of prosperity he conceives himself to have wrung from a malicious world by a conflict in which he has worsted his opponent.’44 Ecstatic dancing was the chief aspect of Kwakiutl religion, and inherited property – which even included areas of the sea, where halibut was found, for example – was the chief organisational basis of society. Immaterial things, like songs and myths, were forms of wealth, some of which could be gained by killing their possessors. The Kwakiutl year was divided into two, the summer, when wealth and social privileges were honoured, and winter, when a more egalitarian society prevailed.45
Benedict’s chapters reporting on primitive societies were bracketed by polemical ones. Here her views clearly owe a huge debt to Boas. Her main theme aimed to show human nature as very malleable; that geographically separate societies may be integrated around different aspects of human nature, giving these societies a distinctive character. Some cultures, she said, were ‘Dionysian,’ organised around feeling, and others ‘Apollonian,’ organised around rationality.46 And in a number of wide-ranging references she argued that Don Quixote, Babbitt, Middletown, D. H. Lawrence, the homosexuality in Plato, may all best be understood in an anthropological context, that is to say as normal variations in human nature that are fundamentally incommensurable. Societies must be understood on their own terms, not on some single scale (where, of course, ‘we’ – whites – always come out on top). In creating their own ‘patterns of culture,’ other societies, other civilisations, have avoided some of the problems Western civilisation faces, and created their own.47
It is almost impossible now to recover the excitement of anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s.48 This was an era before mass air travel, mass tourism, or television, and the exploration of these ‘primitive’ societies, before they changed or were killed off, was one of the last great adventures of the world. The anthropologists were a small number of people who all knew each other (and in some cases married each other: Mead had three husbands, two of them anthropologists, and was for a time Benedict’s lover). There was an element of the crusade in their work, to show that all cultures are relative, a message wrapped up in their social/political views (Mead believed in open marriage; Benedict, from a farming family, was self-educated).
Benedict’s book was as successful as Mead’s, selling hundreds of thousands of copies over the years, available not just in bookstores but in drugstores, too. Together these two students of Boas, using their own research but also his and that of Malinowski and Mead’s husband, Reo Fortune, transformed the way we look at the world. Unconscious ethnocentrism, not to say sexual chauvinism, was much greater in the first half of the century than it is now, and their conclusions, presented scientifically, were vastly liberating. The aim of Boas, Benedict, and Mead was to put beyond doubt the major role played by culture in determining behaviour and to argue against the predominating place of biology. Their other aim – to show that societies can only be understood on their own terms – proved durable. Indeed, for a comparatively small science, anthropology has helped produce one of the biggest ideas of the century: relativism. Margaret Mead put this view well. In 1939, lying on her back, her legs propped against a chair (‘the only posture,’ she explained, ‘for a pregnant woman’), she jotted down some thoughts for the foreword to From the South Seas, an anthology of her writing about Pacific societies. ‘In 1939,’ she noted prophetically, ‘people are asking far deeper and more searching questions from the social sciences than was the case in 1925…. We are at a crossroads and must decide whether to go forward towards a more ordered heterogeneity, or make frightened retreat to some single standard which will waste nine-tenths of the potentialities of the human race in order that we may have a too dearly purchased security.’49
Sociologists were not tempted by exotic foreign lands. There was enough to do at home, trying to make sense of the quiddities thrown up by Western capitalism. Here, a key figure was Robert E. Park, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and the man who more than anyone else helped give sociology a more scientific status. Chicago University was the third of the three great research universities established in America in the late nineteenth century, after Johns Hopkins and Clark. (It was these research universities that first made the Ph.D. a requirement for would-be scholars in the United States.) Chicago established four great schools of thought: philosophy, under John Dewey, sociology, under Park, political science, under Charles Merriam, and economics, much later in the century, under Milton Friedman. Park’s great achievement in sociology was to turn it from an essentially individual, observational activity into a much more empirically based discipline.50