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The work of four early women ethnographers--Elsie Clews Parsons, Ruth Benedict, Gladys Reichard, and Ruth Underhill-- and their emphases on women's roles in Southwestern Indian cultures.

The essay pursues a rereading of Benedict's Patterns of Culture as her probing experiment in search of a temporality appropriate to her aspirations for ethnography. Read between the lines of various of her sources--works by Durkheim, Boas, Einstein, and Bergson--the originality of Patterns is its unfolding of relativity as a series of temporal formulations. In this regard, she brought her powerful ethnographic imagination to bear on the question of what time it is that sustains relativity's ethical and intellectual promise. The purpose of my own experiement with Patterns is not to establish definite connections between her readings and writings, questions and answers, but to grasp something of the bold creativity of her engagement.

In this article I focus on the problem of reconciling analytic and descriptive attention to cultural distinctiveness with the problems posed for it by contemporary globalization and our desire not to efface the agency of those we study. Boasians generally saw no contradiction between cultural contact and cultural integration. Ruth Benedict especially understood our tendency to link agency and individuality as ethnocentric-people made their cultural worlds even as they were profoundly shaped by them. Current discomfort with the culture concept has its roots in a Hegelian mistrust of particularism that pervades even self-consciously antifoundational thought. Drawing on Johann Gottfried Herder, Benedict offers an alternative way of thinking about agency and society, and, thus, a distinctively anthropological contribution to critical thought. Because we cannot understand people's political practice without understanding where they are coming from, cultural description must remain on the agenda of any politically engaged anthropology.

This article engages the transformation of fieldwork as an idea based on specific methodological practices, and the way different conceptions of fieldwork circulated and adapted to the study of the folklore of Jews. Doing fieldwork is not a theory, but as a concept and practice it travels between different disciplinary and ethnographic contexts. This article engages a number of synchronic episodes in which fieldwork was applied to Jewish subjects, tracing the scholarly contexts from which it was borrowed, among them: networks of corresponding authors at the end of nineteenth century in Central Europe; Russian political agendas of “going to the people”; Russian imperial expeditions to Siberia; German diffusionist works in Africa; Boasian anthropology; and studies of Japanese culture from a distance during the Second World War. On the diachronic level, these different crossroads of Jewish folkloristics with other ethnographic initiatives reflect a turbulent history of mobility, displacement, and immigration that underlies Jewish life in the twentieth century. These different adaptations, paths in which fieldwork was translated to the study of Jews, enables an examination of fieldwork as an idea that keeps traveling, or better, in Tim Ingold’s terms, “meshwork”—a texture of interwoven threads.

Although Ruth Benedict has been remembered within Americanist anthropology primarily for her cultural relativism expressed in terms of pattern integration and her best-selling Patterns of Culture (1934), her later work moved beyond the culture-specific study of small-scale societies like those of the American Southwest to encompass cross-cultural examination of modern nation-states. Her anthropology became an explicit tool for multicultural awareness, anti-racism, and humanistic cultural critique in ways that remain relevant today. Reexamination of these ideas is overdue.

  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the majority of women were forced to seek their education outside the walls of American universities. Many turned to museums and libraries, for their own enlightenment, for formal education, and also for their careers. In Roffman’s close readings of four modernist writers—Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Marianne Moore, and Ruth Benedict—she studied the that modernist women writers were simultaneously critical of and shaped by these institutions.   From the Modernist Annex offers new and critically significant ways of understanding these writers and their texts, the distribution of knowledge, and the complicated place of women in modernist institutions.

This article presents Ruth Landes as a transitional figure in 20th-century anthropology between the culture and personality studies of the interwar years and the study of power and structural dynamics so important in the discipline by the end of the century. Expanding on Benedict's theory of culture pattern and employing the life history method, Landes highlights in her work relations of power in the structural dynamics of culture as she explores: the experience of social marginality; the making of the public symbolic order; the plurality of local knowledge systems; the role of the individual; what she called \"the moot problem of women and men\"; and the relationship of researcher and researched.

History of Anthropology is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each of which treats a theme of major importance in both the history and current practice of anthropological inquiry. Drawing its title from a poem of W. H. Auden's, the present volume, Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others (the fourth in the series) focuses on the emergence of anthropological interest in \"culture and personality\" during the 1920s and 1930s. It also explores the historical, cultural, literary, and biological background of major figures associated with the movement, including Bronislaw Manlinowski, Edward Sapir, Abram Kardiner, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. Born in the aftermath of World War I, flowering in the years before and after World War II, severely attacked in the 1950s and 1960s, \"culture and personality\" was subsequently reborn as \"psychological anthropology.\" Whether this foreshadows the emergence of a major anthropological subdiscipline (equivalent to cultural, social, biological, or linguistic anthropology) from the current welter of \"adjectival\" anthropologies remain to be seen. In the meantime, the essays collected in the volume may encourage a rethinking of the historical roots of many issues of current concern. Included in this volume are the contributions of Jeremy MacClancy, William C. Manson, William Jackson, Richard Handler, Regna Darnell, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, James A. Boon, and the editor.

Stassinos contests Kamala Visweswaran's use of a text by Ruth Benedict and her claim that Benedict invented race as a biological construct so that anthropologists would not have to foreground it as an issue of cultural hegemony.

Bellísimo texto fundacional de la antropología cultural que reflexiona sobre las formas culturales y su naturaleza profunda.