Ruth Benedict Quotes

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment.

Each person calls barbarism whatever is not his or her own practice.... We may call Cannibals barbarians, in respect to the rulesof reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.

If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.

Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately. There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way. It's hard to escape your culture.

In the Anthropology Club, as I understood it, you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West.

For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

Savages!' he echoed, ironically. 'You set foot on one of the shores of this globe, professor, and you’re surprised to find savages? Where aren’t there savages? Besides, are they any worse than others, these whom you call savages?

Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.

The theory of cultural bias... is the idea that a culture is based on a particular form of organization. It can't be transplanted except to another variant of that organization.

The world looks different and is understood differently at every spot on earth. Without accepting this simple truth it is hard for us to grasp the behavior of others, the motives and aims of those actions.

We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.'

I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might better understand themselves.

Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.

The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time.

We need to define what culture is. Every human being lives within a culture, and culture means "To grow in." It means to literally fall, and this is exactly what I believe is happening all around us right now.

I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.

[Cultural relativism] licenses the envy of the untalented, giving rise to what has been called the revenge of failure: Those who cannot paint destroy the canons of painting; those who cannot write reject canonical literature.

Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.

...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

Consider the wave of revulsion that floods the average person when he or she hears of the practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs and other so-called primitive peoples. How savage and barbaric such practices seem. But when a Christian or Jew comes across human sacrifice in the Bible (see Jephthah's immolation of his daughter in Judges 11:30-40), is he or she repulsed?