Anthropological Fictions: On Character, Culture, and Sexuality in the Work of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Virginia Woolf

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Kimberly Engber
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Subsequent Response ◽  
Vassar College ◽  
Margaret Mead ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Ruth Benedict

In January 1932, anthropologist Ruth Benedict writes a letter to her colleague Margaret Mead on fieldwork in New Guinea, bringing Mead up to date on the health of “Papa” Franz Boas. Boas, the academic mentor that Benedict and Mead shared at Columbia University, acts as only the momentary locus for their continuing exchange about life and work and the relationship between the two. After giving “her hospital report,” Benedict turns eagerly to another conversation with Mead, asking, “Did you likeThe Waves? And did you keep thinking how you'd set down everybody you knew in a similar fashion? I did. I suppose I'm disappointed that she didn't include any violent temperaments, and I want my group of persons to be more varied” (Mead,Anthropologist at Work, 318). Focusing on the depiction of characters in Virginia Woolf's 1931 novelThe Waves, Benedict presents modernist fiction as a model for ethnography. However, she completely avoids the literary termcharacterin her discussion of Woolf, a particularly odd omission since Benedict had majored in English at Vassar College and since she and Mead regularly exchanged novels and their own poetry in letters.Ruth Benedict's reading ofThe Waveshas been cited as evidence of her tendency toward a vaguely “poetic” anthropology, an argument that tends to separate the aesthetic from the sociopolitical in both Benedict and Woolf. In this essay, I consider Benedict's reading of Woolf, together with Margaret Mead's subsequent response, as evidence of a shared critical engagement with character, culture, and sexuality in the early 20th century.

Benedict, Ruth (1887–1948)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Doran
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Publication Patterns ◽  
Margaret Mead

Known as America’s first woman anthropologist, Ruth Fulton Benedict was a cultural relativist and folklorist. She studied anthropology under Franz Boas (1858–1942) at Columbia University, received her PhD in 1923 and thereafter joined the faculty. Margaret Mead (1901–78) was her student and protégée, and the two maintained a lifelong friendship. Among Benedict’s contributions to the field of anthropology was her publication Patterns of Culture (1934), in which she directed anthropology toward a comparative analysis of culture, through which we learn about a given culture by contextualizing it with others without making moral judgments.

Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Visual Anthropology

Anthropology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Jacknis
Keyword(s):  
New Guinea ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Gregory Bateson ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Margaret Mead ◽  
Ethnographic Methodology

The work of Margaret Mead (b. 1901–d. 1978) and Gregory Bateson (b. 1904–d. 1980) has proven to be critical in forming the subdiscipline of visual anthropology. In 1933 Mead met Bateson on the Sepik River, while both were engaged in ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Soon a couple (they married in 1936), they decided to travel to Bali with the explicit intention of pioneering the use of still photography and film as a basic ethnographic methodology. Before their collaboration Mead had studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University (PhD in 1929), and Bateson was a student of Alfred C. Haddon at Cambridge (MA in 1930). During their lives, neither held a tenured regular academic appointment, although both were active teachers and mentors. In their early and middle years, both worked in the field that came to be known as “culture and personality.” The couple worked together in Bali between January 1936 and March 1938. Following a comparative period of fieldwork among the Iatmul of New Guinea (April 1938–February 1939), they returned to Bali (February–March 1939), before returning to America. From their shared Balinese fieldwork they created a corpus of about 25,000 still photographs and 22,600 feet of 16 mm. film footage—and from the Iatmul of New Guinea, another 11,000 feet of film, and another 8,000 still photographs. From these materials, they produced two photographic ethnographies and seven edited films. These were perhaps the first cultural representations to use images, coupled with texts, as the primary vehicles for making ethnographic arguments and analyses. Although this transformed both visual anthropology and the discipline at large, it took many decades for their achievement to be recognized. Bateson and Mead, each in their own way, continued to advocate for the importance of visual representations in anthropology and related disciplines. After their divorce in 1950, Bateson continued his peripatetic professional career, often working collaboratively. His later work in psychiatry and the behavior of animals (otters, dolphins, and octopuses) found a place for visual documentation of non-verbal forms of communication. Except for her first fieldwork, in Samoa (1925), Mead never took her own photographs, instead collaborating with her ethnographic partners, especially two of her husbands, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson. More so than Bateson, in later life Mead was active in helping create the institutions of visual anthropology, through archives, conferences, publications, and teaching. Bateson and Mead’s visual anthropology has been influential throughout the scholarly world, but given the relatively large literature on the couple, this bibliography has been confined to works published in English.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY IN AMERICAN CULTURE: THE PROBLEM OF INFLUENCE

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 721-732
Author(s):  
RICHARD HANDLER
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Public Voice ◽  
Margaret Mead ◽  
Ruth Benedict

American anthropologists have a PR problem. We know it, and it bothers us. A left-of-center discipline finds it difficult to get across its cultural criticism in a country with center-right mass media. To make matters worse, the discipline is cursed by the fact of having ancestors who hang around, whose contemporary public presence seems greater than anything the anthropologists of this world can muster. The greatest of these anthropological ghosts is Margaret Mead, whom some anthropologists have never forgiven for her celebrity. Even for those of us who admire her, her presence and that of a few other ancestral figures, like Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, throw a glaring light on our own lack of a public voice.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

MAKOTO AS THE INITIAL PRINCIPLE OF THE ETHICAL AND AESTHETIC BELIEFS OF THE JAPANESE

2020 ◽  
pp. 126-138
Author(s):  
M. P. Gerasimova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Driving Factors ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Spiritual Values ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
Hieroglyphic Writing ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

Makoto (まこと, lit.: truth, genuineness, reality, “realness”) is an element of the conceptual apparatus of the traditional worldview of the Japanese. In Japan, it is generally accepted that makoto is a philosophical and aesthetic concept that underlies Japanese spirituality, involving among other principles understanding of the order and laws of the truly existing Universum (shinrabansho̅; 森羅万象) and the universal interconnectedness of things (bambutsu ittai; 万物一体), the desire to understand the true essence of everything that person meets in life, and, unlike other spiritual values, is purely Shinto in origin. After getting acquainted with the Chinese hieroglyphic writing three Chinese characters were borrowed for the word makoto. Each of these characters means truthfulness, genuineness, but has its own distinctive nuances: 真 means truth, authenticity, truthfulness, 実 signifies truth, reality, essence, content, and 誠 again means truthfulness, sincerity, and truth. Makoto (“true words”) and makoto (“true deeds”) imply the highest degree of sincerity of words and honesty, correctness of thoughts, actions, and deeds. The relationship “true words — true deeds” can be seen as one of the driving factors of moral obligation, prompting everyone in their field, as well as in relations between people, to strive to be real. This desire contributed to the formation of a heightened sense of duty and responsibility among the Japanese, which became a hallmark of their character. However, makoto has not only ethical connotation, but aesthetic one as well, and can be considered as the basis on which were formed the concept of mono no aware (もののあ われ、 物の哀れ) and the aesthetic ideal of the same name, that became the first link in the chain of japanese perceptions of beauty. Each link in this chain is an expression of a new facet of makoto, which was revealed as a result of certain elements of the worldview that came to the fore in the historical era.

Idleness and Freedom in Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays”

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.

Textual Events

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Homeric Hymns ◽  
The World ◽  
Real Performance ◽  
Textual Traditions ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ritual Practices ◽  
Formal Features

Recent decades have seen a major expansion in our understanding of how early Greek lyric functioned in its social, political, and ritual contexts. The fundamental role song played in the day-to-day lives of communities, groups, and individuals has been the object of intense study. This volume places its focus elsewhere, and attempts to illuminate poetic effects that cannot be captured in functional terms. Employing a range of interpretative methods, it explores the idea of lyric performances as textual events. Several chapters investigate the pragmatic relationship between real performance contexts and imaginative settings. Others consider how lyric poems position themselves in relation to earlier texts and textual traditions, or discuss the distinctive encounters lyric poems create between listeners, authors, and performers. In addition to studies that analyse individual lyric texts and lyric authors (Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar), the volume includes treatments of the relationship between lyric and the Homeric Hymns. Building on the renewed concern with the aesthetic in the study of Greek lyric and beyond, Textual Events re-examines the relationship between the poems’ formal features and their historical contexts. Lyric poems are a type of sociopolitical discourse, but they are also objects of attention in themselves. They enable reflection on social and ritual practices as much as they are embedded within them. As well as enacting cultural norms, lyric challenges listeners to think about and experience the world afresh.

The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Hilda Doolittle ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

Affective labour and class distinction in the night-time economy

2021 ◽  
pp. 003802612110063
Author(s):  
Steven Threadgold ◽  
David Farrugia ◽  
Julia Coffey
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Dynamics ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Service Work ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
Consumption Experience ◽  
Gendered Politics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Class Distinction

This article contributes to recent debates about the relationship between affective labour and class by exploring the classed distinctions enacted through affective labour in the urban night-time economy. Bringing theories of affective labour into a dialogue with Bourdieusian feminist analysis, the article explores the affective and symbolic dynamics of hospitality labour in a gentrified inner-urban neighbourhood of Melbourne, Australia. It shows how the practice of hospitality labour enacts classed distinctions and tensions emerging from the gentrification of inner-urban areas, and how the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of class contribute to the valorisation of affect in hospitality venues. The valorisation of affect are processes in which the value attributed to an atmosphere or consumption experience is based on the forms of distinction practised within the venue, enacted in aesthetics, tastes and modes of embodiment. The article also shows how practices of class distinction – both ‘punching up’ and ‘managing down’ – are connected to the gendered politics of service work in the way that workers manage the threat of violence or sexual harassment in venues. In general, the article shows how the classed dynamics of gentrification are enacted in affective economies, and therefore how Bourdieusian analysis of class can be usefully deployed in theoretical debates about affective labour.

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