UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
According to Benedict, what is the relationship between the individual and society? Should the concepts of "individual" and "society" be opposite or separate? How does the individual factor into the concept of society, and vice versa?
What relationship between the individual and culture does Benedict reject? Why does she believe individuals wrongly assume that their culture is against them? What does Benedict claim concerning the average person's perception of laws and authority and other instruments of culture?
Does Benedict argue that people are locked into a fate dictated by the boundaries of their culture? Does her interpretation of culture allow room for individuals to express themselves? Why, according to Benedict, do some people see anthropology as "a counsel of despair"? Does she agree?
What happens, in Benedict's analysis, to people within a culture whose natural inclinations are not valued by that culture? What kinds of people does your own culture perceive in this way?
How does Benedict argue by analogy throughout the selection? How does she employ examples and counterexamples to prove her thesis?
Why does Benedict bring up homosexuality? How have different cultures perceived homosexual relationships? How did Benedict's culture perceive such relationships?
What kind of people does Benedict identify as the "psychopathic types of
the period"? Can you cite historical examples of people who were extremely successful in their own cultures but would be considered crazy today?
What does Benedict mean by "cultural relativity"? Why does she believe that it is important to view cultures through a relativistic lens?
MAKING CONNECTIONS
How does Benedict's view of human nature compare with other views presented in this chapter? Would she agree, for example, that the various biological factors outlined by Wilson (p. 356) are universal to the human condition?
How might Benedict respond to Hobbes's concept (p. 94) of a "state of nature" in which no cultural rules influenced human behavior? Is such a state possible, in Benedict's view?
Compare Benedict's view of culture with Margaret Mead's in "Warfare: An Invention- Not a Biological Necessity" (p. 500). What assumptions about human nature is each anthropologist working from?
In other chapters of Patterns of Culture, Benedict argues that the environment in which a culture develops strongly influences its values. She suggests, for example, that the Dobu are extremely competitive because they live in an area where food is scarce and that the Zuni have no taboos against female adultery because their villages have traditionally had fewer women than men. How do such arguments show the influence of Darwin's principle of natural selection (p. 314)?
WRITING ABOUT THE TEXT
Imagine you are an anthropologist from another planet examining the "primitive" culture of Americans. Write an essay describing American values and social institutions from the perspective of such an observer.
How has your culture shaped you? What are some things you do, say, or believe that have directly resulted from the society you were born into? What tenets of your society have you rejected? How does your personal nature work within the standards of your society? Write an essay reflecting on these questions.
Write a rebuttal to Benedict's assertion that other cultures should be observed without an imposition of the observer's values. Would it be possible, or even wise, for you to view such cultural practices as slavery, cannibalism, human sacrifice, or female genital mutilation from a value-neutral perspective?
Compare Benedict's view of human nature to Hobbes's (p. 94) or Wilson's (p. 356). Explain what elements of a human being would be considered "natural" by one of these writers and "cultural" by Benedict.
nicholas carr
A Thing Like Me
[2010]
NICHOLAS CARR (b. 1959) is an American journalist and technology writer. After receiving degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard University, he worked at the Harvard Business Review where he became the executive editor. In 2003, he published an article in that journal entitled "IT Doesn't Matter," arguing that, once a technology becomes universal in the business world, individual businesses no longer derive any competitive advantages from using that technology (because everybody else is using it, too). This became the theme of Carr's first book, Does IT Matter? (2004). In his second book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google (2008), Carr examined the rise of internet-based cloud computing, which, Carr believes, will transform society by permitting a high level of collaboration among people who need never meet in person.
Carr's third book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, became a national bestseller in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In The Shallows, Carr invoked current research on the phenomenon of neuroplasticity, the process by which our brains actually rewire themselves in order to best harness the information available in our environment. In an oral culture, for example, the brain will dedicate the bulk of its excess capacity to the long-term memory that allows people to remember the historical and scientific facts necessary for them to survive. When writing was invented, brains had to rewire themselves to master print literacy. The rise of the internet, Carr believes, will transform human cognition in similar ways, as the cognitive skills necessary to master it are different than those necessary to navigate a library and read books.
In all of his writings, Carr consistently balances enthusiasm for new technologies with warnings about their unintended social consequences. Following in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), an influential Canadian philosopher and communication theorist, he sees computing technologies as tools with the power to reshape nearly every aspect of society—a transition that involves both gains and losses to different people and groups. Though we can rarely stop new technologies from taking hold in society once they have been introduced, Carr believes that we must acknowledge, and try to compensate for, the things that any technology causes us to lose.
"A Thing Like Me" is the final chapter in The Shallows. In it, Carr builds on an anecdote about Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) that he includes earlier in the book. In 1882, Nietzsche became unable to write by hand due to illness and purchased one of the first typewriters, the Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. Nietzsche was so impressed with the typewriter and the way that it allowed him to resume writing that he wrote an ode to it, beginning, "The writing ball is a thing like me." Carr uses this story to illustrate the way that people often merge their own personalities with the tools that allow them to extend their abilities—a process that, he believes, has already begun to happen in the Internet Age. In this section, Carr uses a similar rhetorical strategy, drawing his arguments from a striking historical narrative about human responses to a piece of technology.