BENEDICT, RUTH (1887–1948) was an American cultural anthropologist. Ruth Fulton grew up in a Baptist household in New York State. After four years at Vassar (1905–1909), schoolteaching, and marriage to Stanley Rossiter Benedict in 1914, she enrolled in the anthropology department at Columbia University. In 1923 she earned a doctorate under the aegis of Franz Boas.

On field trips to the Pueblo Indians between 1924 and 1926, Benedict elaborated on ideas about religion that she had formulated in prose sketches, poetry, and early anthropological writings. The significance of Zuni theocracy and ceremonialism is conveyed in her Patterns of Culture (1934). Through the 1930s, Benedict taught at Columbia, edited the Journal of American Folk Lore, and began to compare myths employed in primitive societies with the dreams of utopia current in complex societies. During World War II, at the Office of War Information, Benedict was assigned to work on Japan, a society whose beliefs...