Benedictine Visionings of Southwestern Cultural Diversity: Beyond Relativism

Although Ruth Benedict has been remembered within Americanist anthropology primarily for her cultural relativism expressed in terms of pattern integration and her best-selling Patterns of Culture (1934), her later work moved beyond the culture-specific study of small-scale societies like those of the American Southwest to encompass cross-cultural examination of modern nation-states. Her anthropology became an explicit tool for multicultural awareness, anti-racism, and humanistic cultural critique in ways that remain relevant today. Reexamination of these ideas is overdue.

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