1st Edition

An Anthropologist at Work

By Ruth Benedict Copyright 1959

    An Anthropologist at Work is the product of a long collaboration between Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Mead, who was Benedict's student, colleague, and eventually her biographer, here has collected the bulk of Ruth Benedict's writings. This includes letters between these two seminal anthropologists, correspondence with Franz Boas (Benedict's teacher), Edward Sapir's poems, and notes from studies that Benedict had collected throughout her life. Since Benedict wrote little, Mead has fleshed out the narratives by adding background information on Benedict's life, work, and the cultural atmosphere of the time.Ruth Benedict formed her own view of the contribution of anthropology before the first steps were taken in the study of how individual human beings, with their given potentialities, came to embody their culture. In her later work, she came to accept and sometimes to use the work in culture and personality that depended as much upon social psychology as upon cultural anthropology. She came to recognize that society - made up of persons or organized in groups - was as important as a subject of study as the culture of a society.This volume, greatly enhanced by Mead's contributions, is a record of what was important to Benedict in her life and work. It is expertly ordered and assembled in a way that will be accessible to students and professionals alike.

    Part I; Search: 1920—1930; The Vision in Plains Culture; A Matter for the Field Worker in Folklore 1; Cups of Clay; Counters in the Game; The Uses of Cannibalism; Selections from the Correspondence of Edward Sapir with Ruth Benedict 1922-1923; Two Diaries; Part II; Anne Singleton 1889-1934; The Story of My Life . . .; The Sense of Symbolism 1; Journals; Preface to an Anthology; Selections from the Correspondence of Edward Sapir with Ruth Benedict 1923—1938; Part III; Patterns of Culture 1922-1934; A Brief Sketch of Serrano Culture; They Dance for Rain in Zuñi; An Introduction to Zuñi Mythology 1; Dominant Cultural Attitudes in Manu’a; Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest; Anthropology and the Abnormal; Selections from Correspondence to and from the Field 1924-1934; Part IV; The Years as Boas’ Left Hand; The Bond of Fellowship; Race Prejudice in the United States; Postwar Race Prejudice; The Natural History of War; Ideologies in the Light of Comparative Data; Primitive Freedom; Selections from the Correspondence between Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas 1923-1940; Franz Boas: An Obituary; Part V; The Postwar Years: The Gathered Threads; Recognition of Cultural Diversities in the Postwar World 1; Child Rearing in Certain European Countries; Anthropology and the Humanities; Part VI; Selected Poems 1941; Mary Wollstonecraft;

    Biography

    Ruth Benedict