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The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast two of the most famous female anthropologists of the 20th century, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. I will also briefly mention their backgrounds and the relationship between the two of them. Benedict and Mead were second-generation Boasian women whom met at Barnard College as teacher and student and later befriended each other . Few people are aware of the fact that these two influential women were lovers as well, but their love came with complications .
Both of them published their own innovative books, Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict and Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead; these books gave them both international recognition and fame. Both Benedict and Mead were passionate about their work in anthropology, but they did not always agree. Although they had their own views and did not always agree with one another, they remained close. And to this day, they are both still seen as two of the most influential female anthropologists of all time.
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I will begin with introducing both Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead by writing about their relationship. In the year 1922, they met at Barnard College in an anthropology class. Benedict was a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Columbia working as a teaching assistant at Barnard. Mead was only twenty-one at the time and Benedict was fifteen years her senior . They started off as colleagues, later became friends, and then turned that friendship into a romantic relationship early on .
Banner even states, “The relationship between Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead might be viewed as a conversation, one carried on in poems and letters, through phone calls and personal encounters, over many years.” This shows that their companionship consisted of intimate communication which eventually led to their inevitable romantic relationship.
A similarity Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead shared was their infatuation with the anthropologist, Edward Sapir. Wallace states in his article that during the early 1920’s, Benedict had become close with fellow anthropologist Sapir. Sharing a passion for poetry was what started their friendship. Benedict was attracted to him but apparently never became involved with him, for she was already married and could not stand the thought of cheating on her husband. Unlike Benedict, Margaret Mead did become involved with Sapir after his wife had passed and even requested that she divorce her husband and marry him. Their affair would not last long as Mead had to depart for Samoa, much to Sapir’s dismay. While she was in Samoa, she decided to call off the affair. She claimed that he was not worthy of her love and that she could not stay faithful to him, something that was very important to him. Sapir later ended their relationship by writing her a letter towards the end of her stay in Samoa, mentioning that he knew both her and Benedict preferred each other over him.
According to Sullivan, Sapir was probably the most intelligent and accomplished Boasian from the first generation . Both Benedict and Mead, whom belonged to the second-generation Boasian group, rivaled him. In addition to studying under Franz Boas, he was a mentor to them both. Like some of Boas’ other students, they both attempted to discover what it was that made culture distinctive but coherent . However, they were both attacked by Edward Sapir’s thesis despite both of them being very close to him in the past. A passage from Sullivan’s article indicates:
…was a formidable enemy in what was still a very small community. In the late 1930s, after Benedict’s Patterns of Culture was published, Sapir used his Yale seminar on the psychology of culture to launch an assault on Benedict in particular and, by extension, Mead, arguing that psychology only arises in encounters between persons. Against Mead, this assault was at best ill-founded. That Sapir held that phonemes have psychological reality for the speakers of languages, his assault against Benedict, with her interest in the patterns of events, myths, and ceremonies, seems at best mostly odd.
Ruth Benedict and Margaret mead both acquired fame from the publications of their books, Patterns of Culture (1934) and Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) respectively; it is stated by Sullivan that their books have been more honored than read . In both of these books, the topic of homosexuality was mentioned and observed; Benedict defended homosexuality while Mean praised it. Ruth Benedict was known to use the configurarionist approach, also known as “culture and personality,” when it came to her work. To a certain extent, Mead did so as well as an attempt to please Benedict after angering her for leaving her then husband, Reo Fortune . According to…, Mead using Benedict’s configurationist approach was “her greatest tribute.” Not only were Benedict and Mead known to be associated with “culture and personality,” Banner states:
Mead and Benedict are generally understood as having jointly developed the so-called ‘‘culture and personality’’ or ‘‘configurationist’’ school of American anthropology. Often mythologized, their work prefigured American engagements with semiotics and structuralism as well as introduced the analysis of gender. Benedict in particular deserves credit for developing a notion of cultural selection…
Mead also published another book called Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies in 1935, one year after Benedict published Patterns of Culture (more on this later on). In Banner’s article, he lists off many similarities pertaining to both authors’ books. Benedict and Mead focused their attention on three tribal societies that were located in New Guinea. Benedict studied that Zunis of New Mexico, the Dobus of Melanesia, and the Kwakiult of Vancouver Island located in Canada; Mead studied the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli. A similarity these books share is that one of the societies is peaceful (the Zunis and Arapesh) while the other two are more violent (Dobus and Kwakiutl, Mudugumor and Tchambuli). They both identified the dominant “pattern” in each society they observed while also mentioning social deviants to indicate how certain individuals classified abnormal behavior in one society that might be considered normal in the other. Also, they both stood by cultural relativism, which argues that no society is superior to another one. They both apparently criticized the society of the United States as well. And finally, both books reflected their respective authors’ personal situations and also contained autobiographic elements.
In Sullivan’s article, he notes that Benedict and Mead analyzed cultural patterns in similar ways. At least from the time they began discussing Mead’s Samoan researches, both were interested in the lives lived in and against the shadows of those variable patterns. Mead even credited Benedict with teaching her this method; Mead stated that they, “spent hours discussing how a given temperamental approach to living could so come to dominate a culture that all who were born in it would become the willing or unwilling heirs to that view of the world.”
Though they both shared similarities with one another, be it romantically or anthropological, they still had differing views when it came to their work. Banner states, “Their friendship—as teacher and student, fictive mother and daughter, professional colleagues, and lovers—reached its initial intellectual culmination in two books…” when Mead published Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies as a response to Benedict’s Patterns of Culture. This shows that Mead did not agree with the views and beliefs Benedict wrote in her book and challenged her arguments.
In his article, Banner wrote about Ruth Benedicts and Margaret Meads contrasting views on homosexuality. He states that Benedict, “seemed to define (homosexuality) as an identity, referring to the homosexual as an ‘invert’…she contended that whatever neuroses such individuals displayed in the United States resulted from the way that society treated them, not from any innate predisposition toward abnormality on their part.” She also states that some societies honored homosexuality like the ancient Greeks and certain Native American (like those of the Plains) societies did. Benedict believed that the Plains Indian societies did so mainly because their men-women crossed over gender boundaries to perform work done by both men and women, explaining by they have prosperous households that were envied. However, Mead did not agree with her and believed the adult males encouraged aggressive masculinity and that some gentle males were driven into becoming berdashes. She also asserted that regular members of their society laughed at the men-women. It must be noted that Banner said that Mead favored societies without homosexuality.
Speaking of aggressiveness and men, Banner also writes that Benedict had strong opinions about domineering male behavior in Patterns of Culture. She did not like how the men of the Bodus and Kwakiutl were very domineering, and she also didn’t like the domineering behavior of men in the United States as well. She saw men with power as “arrogant and egotistical,” which implies that Benedict thought all men with power were conceited and self-centered. In Sex and Temperament, Mead also criticized men but viewed them more as maimed than domineering and more insecure than uncaring. This shows that Mead thought that men were so damaged or sensitive that it had a negative impact on their confidence, leading to anxious and brash behavior.
In his article, Sullivan writes that Benedict and Mead had different approaches when it came to comparing cultures with one another. Benedict saw a variety of possible patterns while Mead tried to develop theories involving small sets of dialectically related patterns. This shows that Mead would develop ideas from investigating reoccurring behaviors using her theory of squares, something Benedict was always opposed to; Mead’s method was close to Goldenwieser’s notion of the convergent evolution of social forms than Benedict was.
Once again mentioning Benedict’s and Mead’s relationship with Sapir, only Benedict had the honor of being pursued by him once again. Sapir made advances towards Benedict after calling things off with Mead while she was still in Samoa. Unfortunately, she rejected him each time; Sapir retaliated by writing a scholarly article on the American female’s frigidity, implying he wrote an article about how females failed to accept a man’s offer for sexual intercourse. It seems like Mead was the only one with the honor of having a sexual relationship with Edward Sapir.
Coming back to Banner’s article, he states that Benedict and Mean Inherited Boas’ views and/or approach on racism. Not using a racist point of view is a method Benedict borrowed from Boas. He also believed that the subject of race must be avoided during ethnographic research, yet, Mead did that exactly in an article about racial variation in Melanesia. She wrote about different colored skins the people of Melanesia possessed: the Trobianders had light brown skin while the men in the Northern Solomon Islands were blue-black, the people of the Natty Islands had wavy hair while the Fijans had extremely kinky hair. She also mentioned that men being around six feet in height was a common occurrence in New Guinea. And in her other work, Male and Female, she wrote that even the most inbred and isolated groups make a difference in physique and temperament . Benedict, as Banner writes, “In line with her cultural determinism, Benedict rejected the influence of biology as a significant factor shaping individuals or culture…. They had not proved the influence on human development of heredity of physiology in terms of ‘basal metabolism’ or ‘the functioning of the ductless glands.” Yet, he later writes that Mead and her colleagues, “had begun to construct a ‘constitutional type’ theory, as they realized that cultures, like individuals, had specific styles (or patterns), with the Arapesh gentle, the Mundugumor ferocious, and the Tchambuli mixed. They speculated about these patterns to individuals and societies and fixed temperamental qualities.” Margaret believed that her theory of “constitutional types” illustrates how innovative her biology could be, and also suggested that biology could a transformative force for changing gender. I could go on and on about the similarities and differences between Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, but I will have to conclude the essay.
I attempted to compare and contrast female anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Though they both had different beliefs and views when it came to their anthropological work, there is no doubt that both Benedict and Mead where phenomenal anthropologists; two of the most influential and revered female anthropologists of the 20th century. Though I find it a bit strange that they ended up falling in love with each other as teacher and student, I admire their never-ending love for each other. Despite having differing views on their work, their companionship still managed to stay strong until Benedict’s death in 1948.
Comparison Of Ruth Benedict And Margaret Mead. (2024, Feb 08). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/comparison-of-ruth-benedict-and-margaret-mead-essay
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