Ruth Benedict Quotes

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found,—a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal,—a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization.

Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.

An observer will see the bizarre developments of behavior only in alien cultures, not his own. Nevertheless this is obviously a local and temporary bias. There is no reason to suppose that any one culture has seized upon an eternal sanity and will stand in history as a solitary solution of the human problem. Even the next generation knows better. Our only scientific course is to consider our own culture, so far as we are able, as one example among innumerable others of the variant configurations of human culture.

My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.

The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things ... have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.

Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves.

The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand, a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. [] The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery.

If you study the history of mankind, it seems to be a history of violence. Certainly the history of art, whether you look at paintings or movies or plays or whatever, is just a litany of murder and death.

The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

Its [the anthropological method] power to make us understand the roots from which our civilization has sprung, that it impresses us with the relative value of all forms of culture, and thus serves as a check to an exaggerated valuation of the standpoint of our own period, which we are only too liable to consider the ultimate goal of human evolution, thus depriving ourselves of the benefits to be gained from the teachings of other cultures and hindering an objective criticism of our own work.

Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society

Depended on the soldier. To relax, most of them put on headphones or played video games. Later in the war some of the younger officers began to read a lot of anthropology because they realized that the basic problem was that they were trying to fight a war in a culture they didn't understand. They might have read someone like Margaret Mead.

I think I'm fascinated with history and - just in general. And I'm always interested in how did - how did this come to be? Why is this the way it is? And even singing classical voice, I quickly became more and more interested with early music, baroque voice. And that became an obsession to me - just figuring out how - who are the ancestors of whatever it is.

I wondered why she craved this knowledge and found myself remembering that she was, after all, an anthropologist.

Human social institutions can effect the course of human evolution. Just as climate, food supply, predators, and other natural forces of selection have molded our nature, so too can our culture.

Legends are often destroyed by those in need of its stuff.

Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

Societal transformation isn't going to happen in one month, one year, or even one lifetime. But we see it happen person by person in front of us, and we don't have to worry about the future if we're taking care of the present. In some sense, that's the best insurance policy we can have.

Savages!' he echoed, ironically. 'You set foot on one of the shores of this globe, professor, and you’re surprised to find savages? Where aren’t there savages? Besides, are they any worse than others, these whom you call savages?