In
Defense of Moral Relativism -- Ruth Benedict (1934)
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society, beginning with some slight inclination in one direction or
another, carries its preference farther and farther, integrating
itself more and more completely upon its chosen basis, and
discarding those types of behavior that are uncongenial. Most of
those organizations of personality that seem to us most
uncontrovertibly abnormal have been used by different civilizations
in the very foundations of their institutional life. Conversely the
most valued traits of our normal individuals have been looked on in
differently organized cultures as aberrant. Normality, in short,
within a very wide range, is culturally defined. It is primarily a
term for the socially elaborated segment of human behavior in any
culture; and abnormality, a term for the segment that that
particular civilization does not use. The very eyes with which we
see the problem are conditioned by the long traditional habits of
our own society.
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It is a point that has been made more often in
relation to ethics than in relation to psychiatry. We do not any
longer make the mistake of deriving the morality of our locality and
decade directly from the inevitable constitution of human nature.
We do not elevate it to the dignity of a first principle. We
recognize that morality differs in every society, and is a
convenient term for socially approved habits. Mankind has always
preferred to say, "It is a morally good," rather than
"It is habitual," and the fact of this preference is
matter enough for a critical science of ethics. But historically the
two phrases are synonymous.
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The
concept of the normal is properly a variant of
the concept of the good. It is that which society has approved. A
normal action is one which falls well within the limits of expected
behavior for a particular society. Its variability among different
peoples is essentially a function of the variability of the behavior
patterns that different societies have created for themselves, and
can never be wholly divorced from a consideration of culturally
institutionalized types of behavior.
Patterns
of Culture
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It
is in cultural life as it is in speech; selection is the prime
necessity. The numbers of sounds that can be produced by our vocal
cords and our oral and nasal cavities are practically unlimited. The
three or four dozen of the English language are a selection which
coincides not even with those of such closely related dialects as
German and French. The total that are used in different languages of
the world no one has even dared to estimate. But each language must
make its selection and abide by it on pain of not being intelligible
at all. A language that used even a few hundreds of the
possible—and actually recorded—phonetic elements could not be
used for communication. On the other hand a great deal of our
misunderstanding of languages unrelated to our own has arisen from
our attempts to refer alien phonetic systems back to ours as a point
of reference. We recognize only one k. If other people have
five k sounds placed in different positions in the
throat and mouth, distinctions of vocabulary and of syntax that
depend on these differences are impossible to us until we master
them. We have a d and an n.
They
may have an intermediate sound which, if we fail to identify it, we
write now d and now n,
introducing
distinctions which do not exist. The elementary prerequisite of linguistic
analysis is a consciousness of these incredibly numerous available
sounds from which each language makes its own selections.
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In
culture too we must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the
possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the
environment or by man's various activities. A culture that
capitalized even a considerable proportion of these would be as
unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks, all the
glottal stops, all the labials, dentals, sibilants, and gutturals
from voiceless to voiced and from oral to nasal. Its identity as a
culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this arc.
Every human society everywhere has made such selection in its
cultural institutions. Each from the point of view of another
ignores fundamentals and exploits irrelevancies. ...
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The
Pueblos are a ceremonious people. But that is not the essential
fashion in which they are set off from the other peoples of North
America and Mexico. It goes much deeper than any difference in
degree in the amount of ritual that is current among them. The Aztec
civilization of Mexico was as ritualistic as the Pueblo, and even
the Plains Indians with their sun dance and their men's societies,
their tobacco orders and their war rituals, had a rich
ceremonialism.
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The basic
contrast between the Pueblos and the other cultures of North America
is the contrast that is named and described by Nietzsche in his
studies of Greek tragedy. He discusses two diametrically opposed
ways of arriving at the values of existence. The Dionysian pursues
them through ‘the annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits
of existence’; he seeks to attain in his most valued moments
escape from the boundaries imposed upon him by his five senses, to
break through into another order of experience. The desire of the
Dionysian, in personal experience or in ritual, is to press through
it toward a certain psychological state, to achieve excess. The
closest analogy to the emotions he seeks is drunkenness, and he
values the illuminations of frenzy. With Blake, he believes ‘the
path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ The Apollonian
distrusts all this, and has often little idea of the nature of such
experiences. He finds means to outlaw them from his conscious
life. He ‘knows but one law, measure in the Hellenic sense.’ He
keeps the middle of the road, stays within the known map, does not
meddle with disruptive psychological states. In Nietzsche's fine
phrase, even in the exaltation of the dance he ‘remains what he
is, and retains his civic name.’
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The
Southwest Pueblos are Apollonian. Not all of Nietzsche's discussion
of the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian applies to the
contrast between the Pueblos and the surrounding peoples. The
fragments I have quoted are faithful descriptions, but there were
refinements of the types in Greece that do not occur among the
Indians of the Southwest, and among these latter, again, there are
refinements that did not occur in Greece. It is with no thought of
equating the civilization of Greece with that of aboriginal America
that I use, in describing the cultural configurations of the latter,
terms borrowed from the culture of Greece. I use them because they
are categories that bring clearly to the fore the major qualities
that differentiate Pueblo culture from those of other American
Indians, not because all the attitudes that are found in Greece are
found also in aboriginal America.
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Apollonian
institutions have been carried much further in the pueblos than in
Greece. Greece was by no means as single-minded. In particular,
Greece did not carry out as the Pueblos have the distrust of
individualism that the Apollonian way of life implies, but which in
Greece was scanted because of forces with which it came in conflict.
Zuni ideals and institutions on the other hand are rigorous on this
point. The known map, the middle of the road, to any Apollonian is
embodied in the common tradition of his people. To stay always
within it is to commit himself to precedent, to tradition. Therefore
those influences that are powerful against tradition are uncongenial
and minimized in their institutions, and the greatest of these is
individualism. It is disruptive, according to Apollonian philosophy
in the Southwest, even when it refines upon and enlarges the
tradition itself. That is not to say that the Pueblos prevent this.
No culture can protect itself from additions and changes. But the
process by which these come is suspect and cloaked, and institutions
that would give individuals a free hand are outlawed.
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It
is not possible to understand Pueblo attitudes toward life without
some knowledge of the culture from which they have detached
themselves; that of the rest of North America. It is by the force of
the contrast that we can calculate the strength of their opposite
drive and the resistances that have kept out of the Pueblos the most
characteristic traits of the American aborigines. For the American
Indians as a whole, and including those of Mexico, were passionately
Dionysian. They valued all violent experience, all means by which
human beings may break through the usual sensory routine, and to all
such experiences they attributed the highest value.
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The
Indians of North America outside the Pueblos have, of
course, anything but a uniform culture. They contrast violently at
almost every point, and there are eight of them that it is
convenient to differentiate as separate culture areas. But
throughout them all, in one or another guise, there run certain
fundamental Dionysian practices. The most conspicuous of these is
probably their practice of obtaining supernatural power in a dream
or vision, of which we have already spoken. On the western plains
men sought these visions with hideous tortures. They cut strips from
the skin of their arms, they struck off fingers, they swung
themselves from tall poles by straps inserted under the muscles of
their shoulders. They went without food and water for extreme
periods. They sought in every way to achieve an order of experience
set apart from daily living. It was grown men, on the plains, who
went out after visions. Sometimes they stood motionless, their hands
tied behind them, or they staked out a tiny spot from which they
could not move till they had received their blessing. Sometimes, in
other tribes, they wandered over distant regions, far out into
dangerous country. Some tribes chose precipices and places
especially associated with danger. At all events a man went alone,
or, if he was seeking his vision by torture and someone had to go
out with him to tie him to the pole from which he was to swing till
he had his supernatural experience, his helper did his part and left
him alone for his ordeal.
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It
was necessary to keep one's mind fixed upon the expected visitation.
Concentration was the technique above all others upon which they
relied. ‘Keep thinking it all the time,’ the old medicine men
said always. Sometimes it was necessary to keep the face wet with
tears so that the spirits would pity the sufferer and grant him his
request. ‘I am
a poor man. Pity me,’ is a
constant prayer. ‘Have
nothing,’ the medicine men taught, ‘and the spirits will come to
you.’
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On
the western plains they believed that when the vision came it
determined their life and the success they might expect. If no
vision came, they were doomed to failure. ‘I was going to be poor;
that is why I had no vision.' If the experience was of curing, one
had curing powers, if of warfare, one had warrior's powers. If one
encountered Double Woman, one was a transvestite and took woman's
occupations and habits. If one was blessed by the mythical Water
Serpent, one had supernatural power for evil and sacrificed the
lives of one's wife and children in payment for becoming a sorcerer.
Any man who desired general strengthening or success in particular
ventures sought visions often. They were necessary for warpaths and
for curings and for all kinds of miscellaneous occasions: calling
the buffalo, naming children, mourning, revenge, finding lost
articles.
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When
the vision came, it might be visual or auditory hallucination, but
it need not be. Most of the accounts tell of the appearance of some
animal. When it first appeared it was often in human form, and it
talked with the suppliant and gave him a song and a formula for some
supernatural practice. As it was leaving, it turned into an animal,
and the suppliant knew what animal it was that had blessed him, and
what skin or bone or feathers he must get to keep as a memento of
the experience and preserve for life as his sacred medicine bundle.
On the other hand some experiences were much more casual. There were
tribes that valued especially moments of intimacy with nature,
occasions when a person alone by the edge of a river or following
the trail felt in some otherwise simple event a compelling
significance.
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It
might be from a dream that the supernatural power came to them. Some
of the accounts of visions are unmistakable dream experiences,
whether they occurred in sleep or under less normal conditions. Some
tribes valued the dreams of sleep more highly than any other
experiences. Lewis and Clark complained when they crossed the
western plains in the early days that no night was fit for sleeping;
some old man was always rousing to beat on his drum and ceremonially
rehearse the dream he had just had. It was a valuable source of
power.
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In
any case the criterion of whether or not the experience had power
was necessarily a matter for the individual to decide. It was
recognized as subjective, no matter what other social curbs were
imposed upon its subsequent practice. Some experiences had power and
some had not, and they distinguished by the flash of significance
that singled out those that were valuable. If it did not communicate
this thrill, an experience they had sought even with torture was
counted valueless, and they dared not claim power from it for fear
that the animal claimed as guardian spirit would visit death and
disgrace upon them. ...
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This
belief in the power of a vision experience on the western plains is
a cultural mechanism which gives a theoretically unlimited freedom
to the individual. He might go out and get this supremely coveted
power, no matter to what family he belonged. Besides this, he might
claim his vision as authority for any innovation, any personal
advantage which he might imagine, and this authority he invoked was
an experience in solitude which in the nature of the case could not
be judged by another person. It was, moreover, probably the
experience of greatest instability that he could achieve. It gave
individual initiative a scope which is not easily equaled.
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The
Dionysian slant of Northwest Coast tribes is as violent
in their economic life and their warfare and mourning as it is in
their initiations and ceremonial dances. They are at the opposite
pole from the Apollonian Pueblos, and in this they resemble most
other aborigines of North America. The pattern of culture which was
peculiar to them, on the other hand, was intricately interwoven out
of their special ideas of property and of the manipulation of
wealth.
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The
tribes of the Northwest Coast had great possessions, and these
possessions were strictly owned. They were property in the sense of
heirlooms, but heirlooms, with them, were the very basis of society.
There were two classes of possessions. The land and sea were owned
by a group of relatives in common and passed down to all its
members. There were no cultivated fields, but the relationship group
owned hunting territories, and even wildberrying and wild-root
territories, and no one could trespass upon the property of the
family. The family owned fishing territories just as strictly. A
local group often had to go great distances to those strips of the
shore where they could dig clams, and the shore near their village
might be owned by another lineage. These grounds had been held as
property so long that the village-sites had changed, but not the
ownership of the clam-beds. Not only the shore, but even deep-sea
areas were strict property. For halibut fishing the area belonging
to a given family was bounded by sighting along double landmarks.
The rivers, also, were divided up into owned sections for the
candlefish hauls in the spring, and families came from great
distances to fish their own section of the river.
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There
was, however, still more valued property that was owned in a
different fashion. It was not in the ownership of the means of
livelihood, however far that was carried,
that Kwakiutl proprietorship chiefly expressed itself. Those things
which were supremely valued were prerogatives over and above
material well-being. Many of these were material things, named
house-posts and spoons and heraldic crests, but the greater number
were immaterial possessions, names, myths, songs, and privileges
which were the great boast of a man of wealth. All these
prerogatives, though they remained in a blood lineage, were
nevertheless not held in common, but were owned for the time being
by an individual who singly and exclusively exercised the rights
which they conveyed.
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The
greatest of these prerogatives, and the basis of all others, were
the nobility titles. Each family, each religious society, had a
series of titular names which individuals assumed according to their
rights of inheritance and financial ability. These titles gave them
the position of nobility in the tribe. They were used as personal
names, but they were names that according to tradition had not been
added to nor subtracted from since the origin of the world. When a
person took such a name he assumed in his own person all the
greatness of his ancestors who had in their lifetime borne the name,
and when he gave it to his heir he necessarily laid aside all right
to use it as his own.
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The
assumption of such a name did not depend on blood alone. In the
first place, these titles were the right of the eldest born, and
youngest sons were without status. They were scorned commoners. In
the second place, the right to a title had to be signalized by the
distribution of great wealth. The women's engrossing occupation was
not the household routine, but the making of great quantities of
mats, baskets, and cedar-bark blankets, which were put aside in the
valuable boxes made by the men for the same purpose. Men likewise
accumulated canoes, and the shells or
dentalia they used as money. Great men owned or had out at interest
immense quantities of goods, which were passed from hand to hand
like bank notes to validate the assumption of the prerogatives.
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These
possessions were the currency of a complex monetary system which
operated through the collection of extraordinary rates of interest.
One hundred per cent interest was usual for a year's loan. Wealth
was counted in the amount of property which the individual had out
at interest. Such usury would have been impossible except for the
fact that sea food was abundant and easy to secure, their supply of
shells for money was constantly augmented from the sea, and that
fictitious units of great values were used, the ‘coppers.’ These
were etched sheets of native copper valued as high as ten thousand
blankets and more. They had, of course, very small intrinsic worth
and were valued according to the amount that had been paid for them
when they last changed hands. Besides, the amassing of the return
payments was never the work of one individual in any of the great
exchanges. The entrepreneurs were figureheads of the entire local
group, and, in intertribal exchanges, of the entire tribe, and
commanded for the occasion the goods of all the individuals of their
group.
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Every
individual of any potential importance, male or female, entered this
economic contest as a small child. As a baby he had been given a
name which indicated only the place where he was born. When it was
time for him to assume a name of greater importance, the elders of
his family gave him a number of blankets to distribute, and upon receiving
the name he distributed this property among his relatives. Those who
received the child's gifts made it a point to repay him promptly and
with excessive interest. ...
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The
occasions upon which distribution of property took this form on the
Northwest Coast were legion. Many of them were events which seem at
the furthest remove from economic exchange, and the behaviour proper
among the Kwakiutl at marriage, or death, or upon an accident is
unintelligible until we understand the peculiar psychology that
underlay them. The relations between the sexes, religion, and even
misfortune were elaborated in this culture in proportion as they
offered occasion for demonstrating superiority by the distribution
or destruction of property. The chief occasions were those of the
investiture of an heir, of marriage, and of acquisition and
demonstration of religious powers, of mourning, of warfare, and of
accident.
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The
investiture of an heir was an obvious occasion for uncensored claims
to greatness. Every name, every privilege, had to be bestowed upon a
man's successor, and such bestowal had to be validated by the
characteristic distribution and destruction of property. ‘An
armour of wealth’ had to be buckled upon the new incumbent.
Potlatches of this kind were important and complicated affairs, but
the essential features of the proceedings were nevertheless fairly
simple. The following potlatch `for the greatness of his prince's
name Tlāsotiwalis’ is a characteristic one. It was a feast
for all the tribes of the lineage, and when they were assembled, the
chief, the father of Tlāsotiwalis, gave a dramatic
representation of privileges to which he was entitled by the family
myth, and proclaimed his son's change of name. The heir was now to
assume one of the traditional prince's names, and the
property was ready to distribute in his honour. At the height of the
dancing the chorus sang, in his father's name, the song composed for
him:
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Make way and let him have this [copper] with which I am always trying
to strike my rival chiefs. Do not ask for mercy, tribes, putting out
your tongues and pressing back your hands.
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And
the young prince came out from the inner room carrying the copper
Dentalayu. His father addressed him with goading admonitions: ‘Ah,
you are great, chief Tlāsotiwalis!
Do you really wish it? Is it really your great wish to let it lie dead
by the side of the fire, this copper that has a name, this Dentalayu?
Live up to your prerogatives! For indeed you are descended from
extravagant chiefs who did thus with coppers that had names’ (i.e.,
broke them). His son broke the copper with all attendant ceremony, and
distributed it among his rivals, saying to the guests: ‘I am
following the road made by my chief, my father, the road to walk on,
extravagant, merciless chief, the chief who is afraid of nothing. I
mean this, chiefs, I have danced to pieces Dentalayu for you,
tribes!’ He distributed all the remainder of the property, and
assumed his father's chieftainship. ...
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The
segment of human behaviour which the Northwest Coast has marked out to
institutionalize in its culture is one which is recognized as abnormal
in our civilization, and yet it is sufficiently close to the attitudes
of our own culture to be intelligible to us and we have a definite
vocabulary with which we may discuss it. The megalomaniac paranoid
trend is a definite danger in our society. It faces us with a choice
of possible attitudes. One is to brand it as abnormal and
reprehensible, and it is the attitude we have chosen in our
civilization. The other extreme is to make it the essential attribute
of ideal man, and this is the solution in the culture of the Northwest
Coast.
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