Ruth Benedict

Ruth Benedict was an American anthropologist and a leading figure of the culture and personality school associated with her teacher Franz Boas. In Patterns of Culture (1934) she argued that each culture selects and organizes a distinctive configuration of traits from the wide range of human behavioral possibility, comparing several societies to show how deeply culture shapes individual personality and values, and the book became one of the most widely read works of American anthropology and a major popularization of cultural relativism. During and after the Second World War she applied similar methods to complex modern societies, most notably in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), a study of Japanese culture prepared for the United States government.