Benedict, Ruth

Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. New American Library, 1974. 

And so this history of whiteness and its fluidity is very much a history of power and its disposition. But there is a second dimension race is not just a conception it is also a perception. The problem is not merely how races are comprehended, but how they are seen. In her 1943 obituary of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict recounted how Boas the physicist, having gone to the Arctic to study the properties of water, became Boas the anthropologist upon discovering that his observations did not at all match those of the Eskimos he encountered. Remarked Benedict, He returned with... 

Looking back at an earlier era s race consciousness from the vantage point of the 1940s, Ruth Benedict wrote, In all the American racist volumes there was an immediate political objective revision of the immigration laws. The American temper had changed since the days when our motto was No distinction of race, creed, or color and we offered an asylum for the oppressed. 91 And when, we ought to ask, was thatf At the time that... 

Ruth Benedict, Race Science and Politics [1940] (Westport Greenwood, 1982), p. 126 Samuel Morton, Crania Americana (Philadelphia J. Dobson, 1839), p. 16 Gobineau, Inequality of the Human Races, p. 73, emphasis added Theodore Parker, The Aspect of Slavery in America [1858], Saint Bernard and Other Papers (Boston American Unitarian Association, 1911), pp. 271, 280, 276-277. 

Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1934), p. 15 Race Science and Politics [1940] (Westport Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 97-98. 

Ruth Benedict, The Races of Mankind [1943], in Race Science and Politics, pp. 176-177. The work was also produced as a filmstrip, a traveling exhibit, and an animated cartoon. 

Submitted by P. M. TREICHF.L, J. BENEDICT, AND RUTH GOODRICH HAINES Checked by B. GASSENHEIMERt and T. WARTIKf... 

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