anthropologist, humanist, and poet
Benedict was a student of the Vassar college. In 1990 she became a Bachelor of Arts.
Mrs. Benedict entered anthropology in her mid-thirties under Franz Boas (she was granted the Ph.D. degree in 1923), bringing to it artistic sophistication, an interest in religious experience, a persistent search for a theoretical explanation of deviance and creativity, and an unfailing sense of personal responsibility. Her work falls into several main categories: (1) scholarly ethnological comparative work on American Indian folklore and religion (Concept of Guardian Spirit in North America, Cochiti Mythology, and Zuni Mythology), which included a series of field trips among the Indians of the Southwest, teaching at Columbia University from 1922 to a full professorship in 1948, and leading two field schools (Apache, 1931, and Blackfoot, 1939); (2) editing and organizing materials, including the editorship of the Journal of American Folklore, Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology, and the preparation of a concordance of folklore of the Indians of the Southwest; (3) theoretical writing on the theme which interested her most, relationship between human personality and cultural forms (Patterns of Culture, 1934); (4) work in those fields of human endeavor to which she felt anthropologists had a special responsibility to contribute, i.e., race relations, intercultural relations, education (Race: Science and Politics); and (5) during World War II the application, in the United States Office of War Information, of anthropological methods and hypotheses to the study of contemporary cultures, including Germany, Romania, Siam, and Japan (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 1946). During the last years of her life, she devoted her time to techniques and training in the study of contemporary cultures with particular reference to problems of international relations and world organization.
During her relatively brief professional career of only a quarter of a century, she played a significant role in the development of an interdisciplinary approach to human problems, remaining consistently interested in the insights which could be drawn from the comparative study of cultures which shared a common historical tradition, and in the relationships between anthropology and the humanities, the subject of her presidential address in 1947 to the American Anthropological Association. Patterns of Culture, republished in five languages and many different editions, was a key contribution to the integration of the various disciplines in the field of culture and personality.
