During class on Tuesday, we discussed the importance of Mead and Benedict and the "culture and personality school," wherein we can think of culture as the individual personality writ large. Both were students of Boas and Benedict's thinking was also highly influenced by Sapir. Can we see the roots of their thinking in Boas' work? As we read the week earlier, Boas was drawn to the emotional and mental life, to poetry, to the roots of what makes people individuals (and by extension, how they convey and express themselves). Yet he largely discredited the emerging school of psychoanalysis as an inherently ethnocentric phenomenon arising out of a specific class and psyche (that was not an appropriate framework or lens for the people he worked with).
Benedict was highly influenced by her communications with Edward Sapir, known for his desire for an epistemology for the human sciences that was not a search for "laws" and generalizations but was true to the individual, the concrete and the experiential aspects of peoples. Therefore, Benedict and also Mead were concerned with how the individual became a representative of the social whole... yet there was also an equally important focus on interiority that was emerging.
Yet it is important to remember that Mead and Benedict were a product of their time and their place--1920s New York City @ Columbia, largely influenced by Jews fleeing Germany who brought with them an interest and fashion for psychoanalysis.
We also differentiated the American school from the Durkheimian model of the individual/society. For the Durkheim school, the individual was what was left over that was not society (essentially a negation) vs. the American "rugged individualism" and difference via deviance. For Mead and Benedict, the individual must differ from the social group by rejecting it. Innate to Mead and Benedict is the idea of malleability/plasticity (or that human nature is infinitely moldable, that it can be changed).
Both Mead and Benedict sought to understand culture (as a whole) as parts of the "arc of all human potentialities. Benedict sought to find these cultural patterns in so-called "simple" societies... or those that were outside of "Western" influences (i.e. the Zuni and other Native Americans). When she talks about the primitive, therefore, she is referring to a particular "purity." Again, both her work and Mead's is based on an implicit comparison (that we can see in the discipline reaching far back, per the Margaret Hodgen). This emphasis on comparison makes reading Benedict and Mead seem a little dated for us.
Finally, we discussed how Benedict's notion of culture is very much an aesthetic one (culture is like a poem). She argues that some cultures are more coherent than others--i.e., that they are coherent in terms of individual's commitments to particular parts of an arc or particular themes).
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