SOURCE: "Patterns of Culture: Between America and Anthropology," in Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land, University of Texas Press, 1989, pp. 206-40.

Caffrey is an American anthropologist. In the following excerpt from her biography of Benedict, she assesses the impact that Patterns of Culture exerted on anthropology as a developing field of study.

Patterns of Culture had a multiple impact on American thought. It acted as a signal of and a catalyst for the final acceptance of a profound paradigm change in the social sciences and in American society and set in place the new twentieth-century paradigm or world view which had been taking shape up to that time. In clear, compelling language Benedict drew together the scattered new ideas, filtered them through her own thinking and experience, and articulated a coherent social philosophy, a new set of axioms people could use to give direction to their lives and...