BiblioVault - Books about Ruth Benedict

Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict

The Kinship of Women

Hilary Lapsley

University of Massachusetts Press, 2001

This book tells the story of the extraordinary friendship between renowned anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. First as mentor and protégé, later as colleagues and lovers, these two remarkable yet temperamentally different women forged a bond that endured for twenty-five years, defying convention as well as easy categorization. Drawing on a broad range of sources, including recently released correspondence between Mead and Benedict, Hilary Lapsley reconstructs this complex relationship and situates it in the context of its time. She explores the ways in which Mead's and Benedict's professional work grew out of concerns in their own lives—about sexuality and friendship, identity and difference. Lapsley also shows how Mead and Benedict used their anthropological studies to call attention to the cultural foundations of American life, Benedict seeking to make the world more tolerant of deviance and Mead to liberate the individual from the artificial constraints of gender and race. Overall, the book charts the course of a relationship that persisted in the face of numerous obstacles, including separations of long duration, the competing claims of other partners, secrecy about lesbianism, the tensions of professional rivalry, and the clash of different personalities.

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O'odham Creation and Related Events

As Told to Ruth Benedict in 1927

Edited by Donald Bahr; Foreword by Barbara Babcock

University of Arizona Press, 2001

The origin stories of the O’odham (Pima) Indians of Arizona are renowned for their beauty and complexity but have been collected in only a handful of books. This volume—the third full O’odham telling of ancientness to appear in print—brings together dozens of stories collected in 1927 by anthropologist Ruth Benedict during her only visit to the Pimas. Never before published, they helped inspire Benedict to write her groundbreaking book Patterns of Culture.

The Pimas represented a way of life that Benedict at first called “Dionysian” after hearing the stories, narratives, songs, and oratory collected from various tellers during her three-month stay. The oral literature concerns the creation of the world and its transformations over time, the creation of the O’odham people, and other cultural traditions. Featuring a pair of man-gods, a female monster born of woman, and a conquest of Pimas by Pimas, they serve to mark the O’odham as a people distinct from their neighbors near and far.

The present volume contains more stories than any other source of Pima tales, plus more of the songs and orations that accompanied a telling. It includes “The Rafter,” a host of ancillary stories, numerous Coyote tales, and additional speeches tied to the narratives of ancientness. One long story, “The Feud,” found only in this collection, shows similarities to the Maya Popol Vuh.

Donald Bahr, a preeminent authority on the O’odham, has not only clarified the text but has also written an introduction that provides the background to the collection and analyzes Benedict’s probable reasons for never having published it. He has also included a previously unpublished text by Benedict, “Figures of Speech among the Pima.” O’odham Creation and Related Events represents an invaluable sourcebook of a people’s oral literature as well as a tribute to a singular scholar’s dedication and vision.

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Ruth Benedict

Stranger in This Land

By Margaret M. Caffrey

University of Texas Press, 1989

Poet, anthropologist, feminist—Ruth Fulton Benedict was all of these and much more. Born into the last years of the Victorian era, she came of age during the Progressive years and participated in inaugurating the modern era of American life. Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land provides an intellectual and cultural history of the first half of the twentieth century through the life of an important and remarkable woman.

As a Lyricist poet, Ruth Benedict helped define Modernism. As an anthropologist, she wrote the classic Patterns of Culture and at one point was considered the foremost anthropologist in the United States—the first woman ever to attain such status. She was an intellectual and an artist living in a time when women were not encouraged to be either. In this fascinating study, Margaret Caffrey attempts to place Benedict in the cultural matrix of her time and successfully shows the way in which Benedict was a product of and reacted to the era in which she lived.

Caffrey goes far beyond providing simple biographical material in this well-written interdisciplinary study. Based on exhaustive research, including access for the first time to the papers of Margaret Mead, Benedict's student and friend, Caffrey is able to put Benedict's life clearly in perspective. By identifying the family and educational influences that so sharply influenced Benedict's psychological makeup, the author also closely analyzes the currents of thought that were strong when Victorianism paralleled the Modernism that figured in Benedict's life work. The result is a richly detailed study of a gifted woman.

This important work will be of interest to students of Modernism, poetry, and women's studies, as well as to anthropologists.

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