STRANGER IN THIS LAND: THE LIFE OF RUTH BENEDICT

Ruth Benedict was born into the last years of the Victorian era, came of age during the Progressive years, and participated in inaugurating the modern era of American life. In common with others of her generation she rejected rigid Victorian strictures and wrestled with the implications of Darwinism and the challenge of creating a new intellectual synthesis from its contradictions. She struggled to find a role for herself as both intellectual and woman in American society, and sensitive to the Progressive imperative of social reform as an intellectual activist in the struggle for social change. She turned first to feminism and education. But her discovery of anthropology after World War I gave her both an outlet for sheer intellectual play of ideas and a tool for intellectual social change. When she entered it, anthropology was at the point of replacing natural history as the source of scientific moral authority in America. It was also at the beginning of a period of expansion which would give it a primary role among the social sciences. Benedict, using anthropology as a base, contributed through her writings toward creating a Modern framework of thought in America, one based on a relative rather than an absolute intellectual system and the role of culture over biology. Her classic book, Patterns of Culture, acted as a catalyst to confirm the change from the Victorian constellation of values to the Modern and provided orienting concepts for developing the new underlying set of twentieth century values. In her role as an anthropologist Benedict influenced American thought on racism and on the Japanese after World War II. She was working on a project to further understanding among the cultures of the United Nations when she died.;While having such decided impact on American culture at large, Benedict's work failed to establish a corresponding set of orienting concepts for anthropology beyond her lifetime. In the identity struggle within anthropology, which centered around the definition of anthropology as a science, Benedict was not successful in establishing a valid alternative view of science outside the traditional model of the physical sciences, still an area of concern today.