╚Benedict, Ruth Fulton1887╨1948anthropologistBorn on June 5, 1887, in New York City, Ruth Fulton grew up in Norwich, New York, in St. Joseph, Missouri, in Owatonna, Minnesota, and in Buffalo, New York, as her widowed mother moved from teaching job to job, finally becoming a librarian in Buffalo. She had a difficult childhood that left her with deep psychic scars. She graduated from Vassar College in 1909, lived in Europe for a year, and then settled in California, where she taught in girls╒ schools. She married Stanley R. Benedict, a biochemist, in June 1914 and returned to New York. For some years she sought vainly for an occupation. In 1919 she enrolled at the New School for Social Research, where the influence of Elsie Clews Parsons and Alexander Goldenweiser sent her to study anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia University. Taking her doctorate in 1923 with a dissertation on ╥The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America,╙ she became a Columbia instructor the next year, an associate professor in 1931, and a full professor in 1948, only a few months before her death. Her first book, Tales of the Cochiti Indians, 1931, and her two-volume Zuûi Mythology, 1935, were based on 11 years of research into the religion and folklore of Native Americans, predominantly the Pueblo, Apache, Blackfoot, and Serrano peoples. Patterns of Culture, 1934, was a major contribution to anthropology. In that book she demonstrated, through a comparison of Zuûi, Dobu, and Kwakiutl cultures, how small a portion of the possible range of human behavior is incorporated into any one culture, and argued that it is the ╥personality,╙ the particular complex of traits and attitudes, of a culture that defines the individuals within it as successes, misfits, or outcasts. Six years later, with the publication of Race: Science and Politics, she showed that the unity of mankind is a simple fact, despite the arrogance of racists. From 1925 to 1940 she edited the Journal of American Folklore. During 1943╨1945 she was a special adviser to the Office of War Information on dealing with the peoples of occupied territories and enemy lands. A long standing interest in Japanese culture bore fruit in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 1946. She returned to Columbia in 1946, and in 1947 she was president of the American Anthropological Association. By that time she was acknowledged the outstanding anthropologist in America. In the summer of 1948 she began her most comprehensive research undertaking as director of a study of contemporary European and Asian cultures sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and by Columbia. Upon returning from a trip to Europe she became ill, and she died in New York City on September 17, 1948. ₧styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ 0 !I W 5¬ X !I W 5¬ X !I h !I ä !I ƒ !I ¡ !I O !I b !I , !I F !I ├ !I ▀ !I » !I ╧ !I link `
