An anthropologist at work

About this book

This book is both the history of a new approach to anthropology and the biography of a brilliant, sensitive, and elusive woman. It is the posthumous product of a long collaboration between two distinguished anthropologists, Ruth Benedict, who died in 1948, and Margaret Mead, who was first her pupil, then her friend and colleague, and now her literary executor and biographer. The approach can best be described in Ruth Benedict's own phrase: that a culture is "a personality writ large." It is a people's culture that binds them together, and culture is inherited not biologically but through customs handed down from one generation to another. As each individual is related to his cultural background, so is each culture related to the general background. This theory is illuminated and its development shown through a careful selection from Benedict's articles, journals, and correspondence, woven into a continuous narrative and amplified by Mead. From this narrative, there emerges the figure of a complex and fascinating woman, at once diffident and determined, gentle and inflexible, affectionate and solitary. The paradox of Benedict's life as daughter, wife, student, teacher, poet, researcher, and writer is interpreted by the lucid and perceptive observations which introduce each section and make this book by two of the foremost anthropologists of our generation unique.--From publisher description.