Ruth Benedict

The chrysanthemum and the sword : patterns of Japanese culture

The Japanese were the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle. In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking. Like Czarist Russia before us in 1905, we were fighting a nation fully armed and trained which did not belong to the Western cultural tradition. Conventions of war which Western nations had come to accept as facts of human nature obviously did not exist for the Japanese. It made the war in the Pacific more than a series of landings on island beaches, more than an unsurpassed problem of logistics. It made it a major problem in the nature of the enemy. We had to understand their behavior in order to cope with it.

An anthropologist at work : writings of Ruth Benedict

The product of a long collaboration between two distinguished anthropologists, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, who was Benedicts pupil, colleague, and finally, literary executor and biographer.

Transmitting Our Democratic Heritage in the Schools

No educational policies can of themselves make a stable society out of our unstable one. In our changing culture it is necessary to base our teachings upon fundamental commitments of our culture if we are to avoid teaching many things the child will have to unlearn later. Transmission of our democratic heritage is most threatened at the point of transition from childish dependency to adult independence.

Race Problems in America

can file the Englishman and the Irish, the Italian and the Spaniard in separate pigeonholes. To the scientist, race is a classification based on hereditary traits combined in any individual according to the laws of genetics; except under conditions of primitive isolation, human races show endless gradations and mixtures. In popular parlance there are innately superior races and innately inferior; science knows no group where superiority has been specialized in the whole