From Anthropology and the Abnormal RUTH BENEDICT
Modern social anthropology has become more and more a study of the varieties and common elements of cultural environment and the consequences of these in human behavior. For such a study of diverse social orders primitive peoples fortunately provide a laboratory not yet entirely vitiated by the spread of a standardized worldwide civilization. Dyaks and Hopis, Fijians and Yakuts are significant for psycho- logical and sociological study because only among these simpler peoples has there been sufficient isola- tion to give opportunity for the development of localized social forms. In the higher cultures the stan- dardization of custom and belief over a couple of continents has given a false sense of the inevitability of the particular forms that have gained currency, and we need to turn to a wider survey in order to
check the conclusions we hastily base upon this near- universality of familiar customs. Most of the simpler cultures did not gain the wide currency of the one which, out of our experience, we identify with human nature, but this was for various his torical reasons, and certainly not for any that gives us as its carriers a monopoly of social good or of social sanity. Modern civilization, from this point of view, becomes not a necessary pinnacle of human achievement but one entry in a long series of possible adjustments.
These adjustments, whether they are in manner- isms like the ways of showing anger, or joy, or grief in any society, or in major human drives like those of sex, prove to be far more variable than experience in any one culture would suggest. In certain fields, such as that of religion or of formal marriage arrange- ments, these wide limits of variability are well known and can be fairly described. In others it is not yet pos- sible to give a generalized account, but that does not absolve us of the task of indicating the significance of the work that has been done and of the problems that have arisen.
Ruth Benedict, excerpts from “Anthropology and the Abnor- mal.” The Journal of General Psychology 10 (1934), pp. 59–82. © 1934 Routledge. Reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com).