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Loading... Patterns of Culture (1934)by Ruth Benedict
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 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 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. no reviews | add a review
A study of the civilizations of the Zuni Indians, the natives of Dobu, and the Kwakiutl Indians. No library descriptions found. |
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I really wanted to love this book, but I couldn’t. The three chapters about the different cultures were decent, although I would have like them to have been split up into multiple sections by subject to make it easier to digest the information. I also would have liked a bit more information about some of the really different and unusual practices of the cultures. In several cases, I was left with more questions than answers. The three chapters of introduction and two chapters of conclusion, however, were mind-numbingly boring and only seemed to be marginally related to the three cultures that made up the rest of the book. Overall, it was an interesting subject and an interesting approach, but the book could have been written and organized better. ( )