American Academy of Political and Social Science

Recognition of Cultural Diversities in the Postwar World Author(s): Ruth Benedict Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 228, The United Nations and the Future (Jul., 1943), pp. 101-107 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1022822 Accessed: 05/02/2009 14:32
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Recognitionof CulturalDiversities in the PostwarWorld'

By
RUTH BENEDICT

N THE United States the serious scientific study of other races and other cultures consciously chosen because they lay outside our own cultural background has ranked as a somewhat esoteric pursuit. It did not have behind it the practical considerations that it had in the British Empire or in Germany; it was far from our national concerns. This war is changing these conditions, and the postwar world will intensify them. Success and failure in our own national economy will hang upon the degree to which we are able to work with races and nations whose social order and whose behavior and attitudes are strange to us. This strangeness Americans have typically met under conditions little calculated to serve as guides for the postwar situation. Our national experience in Americanizing millions of Europeans whose chief wish was to become Americans has been a heady wine which has made us believe, as perhaps no nation before us has ever believed, that, given the slimmest chance, all peoples will pattern themselves upon our model. This conviction is an integral part of all that is best in our national character, of our moral convictions of rightness, of our unwillingness to use naked force. We do not believe that we shall have to knock people over the head to make them adopt the blessings of our civilization; we are convinced that they will want to.
1 This paper is presented as part of the program of the Council on Intercultural Relations which is attempting to develop a series of systematic understandings of the great contemporary cultures so that the special values of each may be maintained and enhanced in the postwar world. 101

The postwar world will bring us face to face with a quite different situation; and just insofar as the United Nations succeed in operating through mutual cooperation, the need for cultural understanding will be intensified. Deep-lying cultural diversities were not a matter of intensely practical moment so long as the relationship of Western nations to the rest of the world was authoritarian, whether in political or in industrial enterprises. In such relationships the foreigner deals with the whole culture only tangentially, and needs only isolated bits of understanding of the culture with which he deals. But the cooperation of the United Nations in the postwar world, President Roosevelt has said, is to "lay the basis of that enduring world understanding upon which mankind depends for its peace and its freedom." To realize that goal, we shall have need of the kind of knowledge which results in understanding.
RACE PREJUDICE UNFOUNDED

This article presents some of the considerations from my own field of anthropology if the United Nations in the postwar world are indeed to lay such a basis of enduring world understanding. We shall have to deal with all the races of the world, and the stock American reaction to differencesof race is a judgment of superiority or inferiority. Scientific work on race, on the contrary, proves that racial physical differences are nonfunctional, and contrast sharply in that respect with physical specializations among animals. In domesticated animals other than man, inherited physiological traits make some dogs fitted for hunting and some for pulling

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on a psychological scale of values. To those who live within each culture, its ways of ordering existence are automatic, and they cannot function efficiently if basic reversals of habit are required of them. These cultural patterns are coherent within themselves. They are not fortuitous congeries of traits. This is inevitable, since these cultures are carried by living men and women in their habituated bodies and minds. Some cultures are more and some are less integrated, but there is a limit beyond which lack of integration produces catastrophic psychic conflict in individuals and chaos in society. Anthropologists have brought together from small, compact, primitive tribes docuEACH CULTURE MAY BE SATISFACTORY mentation on extremely coherent valueTO ITS MEMBERS systems, and after such training, the The crucial differences which distin- more closely one looks even at modern guish human societies and human beings civilizations, the more systematic and are not biological. They are cultural, coherent they appear. Crucial cultural and in a co-operative postwar world we situations in early childhood or in shall have to have some understanding adolescence, certain acts the society of these cultural differences. This is a specifically rewards throughout life, untruism which is often read off to mean derlie attitudes and behavior that are that in a reconstruction program we politically standardized and are basic should provide food that the recipients in class relations and in trade. They will accept, or plan houses such as they hold together, and any one item must are accustomed to live in. Of course. be taken in conjunction with the whole But the anthropologist does not mean structure or it has no relevance. Each this. He means that in estimating be- item is, as it were, a brick in a total havior which is culturally our own as structure; and tearing out the bricks well as in estimating that which is alien indiscriminately, however inconsequento us, we must see it as a historical tial they seem, may bring the whole product, man-made and inevitably par- structure down in ruins. This does not tial. No one culture has ever developed mean that change is impossible, but that all human potentialities; it has always changes have to be adapted to the existselected certain capacities, mental and ing building. emotional and moral, and stifled others. With every occupied country the Each culture is a system of values United States assists in freeing from which may well complement the values Axis domination, with every Asiatic in another. No culture, except as it country where we operate in co-operafunctions to decrease or increase the tion with the existing culture, the need happiness of its members,2can be ranged for intelligent understanding of that
2 Because of the different goals for which people strive in different cultures and the dif-

loads; but in mankind, racial differences are hair texture, nose form, cephalic index, skin color, and the like. No one race has a more useful hair or nose or head shape. Very light skin color penalizes some white men in the tropics and they have to take precautions, but many white breeds suffer no difficulty at all. Scientific work has shown also that no race has a monopoly of superior individuals. Good intellect, good health, and good moral characterare distributed in all races, and, given propitious social conditions, increase steeply. The arrogance of race prejudice is an arrogance which defies what is scientifically known of human races.

ferent character structure induced, what happiness consists in differs in different societies.

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country and its ways of life will be crucial. These nations will very likely not respond to appeals with which we are familiar, and not value rewards which seem to us irresistible. The danger-and it would be fatal to world peace-is that in our ignorance of their cultural values we shall meet in head-on collision and incontinently fall back on the old pattern of imposing our own values by force.
OUR IDEA OF DEMOCRACY

I have selected one such area of behavior which can be mapped out and in which we could be forewarned. It concerns both the ideology and the practice of democracy itself. Democracy in its cross cultural meaning is best described by Lincoln's phrase-"of the people, by the people and for the people"; but democracy in different parts of the world has necessarily been additionally defined to include the practices that are in each case relied upon to give the people a voice in their own affairs. Especially in the United States it means extended suffrage, representative government, and the party system. To democracy as thus defined, we have strong ethical commitments and a national loyalty. In our postwar co-operation with other parts of the world these deep loyalties will inevitably lead Americans to believe that adoption of our system is the one trustworthy means to democratic government. In the United States, political democracy is inseparable from acceptance of the will of the majority and protection of the minority. It is a two-party system which, when there is no issue at stake between the two parties, has by its own logic to carry on the conflict as if there were. This is true because our political system necessarily involves a group which is "in" and a group which is "out," and the "outs" must, if the system is to function, have the right to

change places. The "ins" therefore must, within the framework of the system, leave open to the "outs" the possibility of becoming "ins." It is one of our firm cultural dogmas that the majority will be speaking and acting for the common welfare; but from the standpoint of cultures which do not have this system, there seems to be no provision that this will be true. As far as our system goes, there may be little choice as to which speaks more clearly for considered public welfare. All that is basic to our system is that both parties speak and act for themselves and for their own interests.
CONTRASTING IDEA OF DEMOCRACY

I have stressed the dangers as they appear to those who are not born and bred to the system, because it is important to realize that only the western fringe of Europe shares with North America and Australia this system of political democracy. Elsewhere it is alien or has been most insecurely poised for certain brief intervals upon different arrangements. The rest of the world has a contrasting arrangement upon which its peoples build the democracy they have. Whereas our democracy is based on a dogma of conflicting interests which must present themselves under any and all circumstances, their democracy is based on a dogma of reconcilability of interests, the key to which can be found in any and all circumstances by men of good will. Obviously, neither of these dogmas is objectively true; one system chooses and elaborates one ever present aspect of community relations, and the other a different one. Those cultures which have selected the reconcilability of local interests do not create minorities in order to arrive at social decisions or to carry out group projects. There are no "ins" and no "outs." Social action in

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regard to their own affairs is taken by the local community through a council of elders in close touch with all villagers. This council has great responsibilities: seeing that state taxes are met, naming workers for public projects sponsored by the community, sometimes making all arrangements for calendric festivals, sometimes periodically reallotting land according to the needs of families. The elders, in order to maintain their position, must keep their identification,even when they are collecting taxes or rent, not with the state or with the landlords but with the village, and the sanction invoked for social control and activities is rooted in village solidarity.
CHINA'S FORM OF DEMOCRACY

China is an excellent illustration of this kind of political organization. Its traditional procedures are still basic to its culture, whatever the dislocations of the last few years. We all concede that China has been a great democraticcountry. But no smallest fraction of its right to be called democratic comes from its national or even its provincial administrations. At these levels there is no representative assembly and no official elected by the people. At these levels the people have no voice. Politically speaking, China is democratic only by virtue of organized local responsibility. A community has two groups of responsible citizens, the first group made up of heads of all extended families and the other group composed of scholars, large landowners, and especially honored local citizens. Neither of these groups has any voice at the provincial or national level. Provincial and national governments inform the heads-offamilies council of the amount of the tax, and these family heads see that the stipulated sums are ready for the tax collector. Local defense, care of waterways and irrigation, provision for ca-

lendric feasts and ritual, are the concern of the local councils. To these functions were added by the 1938 government subsidies the highly congenial corporateactivities of local agrarianand industrial co-operatives. Offenders were generally dealt with in the extended family, and Confucian morality demanded that neither the older nor the younger generation denounce the other, but that every effort be made to rehabilitate the person who acted in opposition to the mores. The present Chungking government has legalized the responsibility of the family head, making him liable for violation on the part of any courtyard member. Betrayal of village trust was a different matter; if an official enriched himself unduly from the common funds or accepted a bribe from landlords or state officials, the penalty was banishment. This was not formally decreed, but the community pointed a finger of scorn so that such individuals found it preferable to go to distant provinces for a decade or so. There is in all this local democratic system in China no place for "ins" and "outs," no elections, no identification of democracy with protecting the rights of minorities.
DEMOCRACY IN OTHER REGIONS

As Herbert L. Matthews says in a dispatch to the New York Times3 in describing a region with analogous social arrangements in the Punjab: "For a Westerner with democratic and nationalistic ideas, there is something wrong with the picture"; but he insists that in Kapurthala the villagers are well content with their "political and communal peace." Throughout the Punjab, the system of organized local responsibility has operated to weld together into a functioning whole even the caste system, which has often impressedWestern
3 March 19, 1943.

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observers as the most extreme institution in the world for setting up social separatism. This impression is at least partly due to the fact that our students of political organization have so consistently minimized the coexisting village organizationof common community interests and responsibilities. In the Punjab it has been able to operate effectively even through the mechanism of the caste system. In Russia, councils of local communities, in addition to being organs of fiscal administration, were also responsible for periodic land redistribution among constituent families. Individual use and not individual ownership of farm land was the common privilege of all families, and from the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, local administration was chiefly directed toward arrangements for sharing the taxes imposed at the capital. The mirs combined into larger groups, the volosti, which entered into mutual guarantees for settling their tax accounts. In one or other of these forms, or in still others, these village organizations for local mutual services and joint responsibility are found in southern and eastern Europe, as well as in China, India, and Russia. Poland is an example of conditions found generally in eastern Europe. Land is entailed in the family, but pasture or wood lots may be villageowned. Biological families have taken the place of large extended families. The co-operative village is still the basic unit. Community affairs are discussed in the village assembly made up of all residents who are more than twentyfour years old and who have lived in the village more than a year. In large villages a council is selected. They act in matters of health and education, moral infractions, crop destruction, theft of means production, fires, expenditure

of village tolls, and matters of grievance. Community functions in a tenant village do not differ from those in a village of free landowners. Tenant villages have protested angrily and often effectively against excessive exactions. If letters of grievance and face-to-face personal protests fail, villagers may then attack the landowners' barns or other property and thus carry their point. In 1933, when Poland broke up many large estates in order to create peasant holdings, this land was given to these village councils for distribution to villagers. Grass-roots democracy was built securely into the folk life of this great area of eastern and southern Europe. These village councils were trusted because they were directly responsible to the community, which could make its voice heard in all decisions. But everywhere there were also powerful outside forces whose interests were antagonistic. In some countries these were landlords whose demands might become excessive, in some these were priests, in some these were state officials. At their door the villagers laid their troubles when they could not make ends meet and when it was impossible to meet the village responsibilities.
IMPORTANCE OF. EXISTING PRACTICES

Military administration in countries of this type, when they are liberated from Axis domination, will be able to utilize for purposes of reconstruction their deeply grounded local solidarity. Broken as these countries will be, they will be capable of local rehabilitation if long folk practice in community cooperation is mobilized. In strongest contrast to America, it is the local village that has had experience in community planning. The local leadersthe starista, the gospodar, the wojtare the lieutenants in the postwar campaign. We must not fail to recognize

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them because of our unfamiliarity with their form of democracy. These political arrangements in these countries are equally important because in their functioning they have created behavior patterns which are also strange in our American experience. Centuries of conviction that individual interests are reconcilable, centuries of experience in mutual help, have given them a character structure which we must learn to understand. This character structure trusts and relies upon joint activity and joint profits as we do not. It regards as simple fact, not as moral precept, the adage that if you help others they will help you. It condemns those who improve their own personal affairs at the expense of common interests. It would not be true to say that they place the common interest above individual interests; they regard their individual interests as best served when they act jointly.
OF MANIFESTATIONS INDIVIDUALISM

prise; it expresses itself in a contempt for a "soft" life, and identifies virtue with lack of the very amenities which reward individual enterprise in our culture.
CONFLICT AND ITS RESULTS

Americancharacterstructure has been formed from a different set of experiences. Our "ruggedindividualism"is almost a synonym for resentment of group responsibilitiesattached to private property; it demands great freedom in the disposition of goods and profits. It is inseparable from the American dreamindividual success in economic ventures. The power to fix the conditions under which other people work or carry on their business is one that almost any American would like to wield. In these European countries, too, strong individualism is often present, but it demands not unlimited financial autonomy, but a life unpatterned by dominance-submission;men are willing to pool labor and profits, but they find it difficult to work for wages on somebody else's project without a voice in their affairs. Their "rugged individualism" is not identified with free enter-

In all these countries there has been for decades increasing infiltration of the kind of individualismwith which we are more familiar. More and more men have had to produce for the competitive market, and more and more men have left their self-sufficient farms for work as laborers. It has produced inevitable change and conflict. This is a background for the situation with which postwar reconstruction will have to cope. Both patterns of life are known, and the conflict between them is known. Therefore we shall have to understand these areas' traditional methods of dealing with conflict; we shall have to recognize that they lack experience with the two-party system which depends for its existence on guaranteeing to the minority the right to make itself the majority. Their deeply rooted experience has taught them to rely on ostracism when individuals offend the community, and when the persons that are excluded from the group become numerous, this process becomes schism or revolution. It becomes schism and revolution, too, when the opposition of villager and seignior becomes too acute. The traditional commitment of these countries is to the dogma that interests can be reconciled; and when this fails and powerful or numerous groups oppose one another, factionalism and violence are serious social threats. When one faction in a nation in this area has seized power, we have called these governments totalitarian; but this kind of seizure of power is the inevitable outcome of the folkways of these nations in circumstances of crisis.

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They are still relying on their old fa- criterion for judging the success of each miliar mechanism of ostracism from the country's efforts in reconstruction is community. To Americans, this is the whether it is progressively furthering ultimate breakdown of any democratic the general welfare. Except in the narrow western strip of system; but in their view of life, the crucial point is quite different. They Europe north of the Pyrenees and the test totalitarian regimes by their old Alps, which has long experimentedwith folk test of village democracy: whether democratic elections, the commonwealth or not mutual services are progressively of the postwar world will necessarily be becoming better organized. If the built upon a set of folk commitments regime accomplishes more and more for which differ from ours. It may well be the common welfare, by their standards that eventually they will adopt some of it is democracy. If it does not, it is our methods, but it will not be in toto tyranny. Their test is different from and it will not be immediately. It ours, and both are culturally condi- would be tragic if in the process their cultural values built up by centuries of tioned. experience were lost in the shuffle. We DIFFERENCES SHOULD BE RESPECTED shall have to explore the resources they In our dealings with liberated coun- offer-their experience in nonpolitical tries of Europe we shall succeed better local representation, their dogma of the if we respect their values. Certainly reconcilability of interests, their special we shall sow only bitterness if we try to habits of sharing labor and profits. impose our own by force. We shall be Whether the problem at hand is a TVA on firmer ground if we recognize that on the Danube or getting in the first progress toward a genuine common- harvest after liberation or the care of wealth will of necessity take different child waifs separated from their parforms in different nations. They have ents, we shall have to be aware of their had experience with different social folkways and of their character strucforms and their character structure is ture. We shall need to understand their different. From the point of view of particular cultural versions of human comparative cultures, the one universal life. Ruth Benedict, Ph.D., is associate professor of anthropology at Columbia University, New York City. She has made six field trips to the Indians of the Southwest. She was president of the AmericanEthnological Society from 1926 to 1928, and editor of the Journal of American Folklore from 1925 to 1940. She is author of Patterns of Culture (1934) and Race: Science and Politics (1940).