SOURCE: "Patterns of Culture: 1922-1934," in An Anthropologist at Work. Writings of Ruth Benedict, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959, pp. 201-12.

Mead was a leading figure in American anthropology whose works, including Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), emphasized a vital relevance between "primitive" and modern societies which she believed could illuminate contemporary social problems. In the following excerpt, she studies Benedict's defining methods and principles as an anthropologist.

Ruth Benedict stood midway between the older type of anthropology, in which theoreticians—men like Tylor or Frazer, Lang or Crawley—worked with materials gathered by others—with old documents, travelers' and missionaries' accounts, or with notes laboriously written down by native converts—and the kind of anthropology related to living cultures, which grew out of field work in the South Seas and in Africa. Because she wanted vivid materials, she valued old eyewitness...