PATTERNS OF CULTURE

A contributing work in the history of anthropological thought. Ruth Benedict, as was Margaret Mead, was a proponent of the "culture and personality" school of anthropological thinking. Here, she compared the Dobus of New Guinea, the Pueblos of New Mexico, Kwakiutls of the Northwest Coast and the

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Great Plains nations and argued that the values of each are intelligible in terms of its own coherent cultural system and that the individual should be seen within the context of his or her own culture. Basically, it is a treatise advocating cultural relativism.

The book is well written and worth a read if you are interested in the subject and even if you do not find her arguments persuasive 70 years of anthropological research later.

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