Culture and Personality

“Culture and personality” has been perhaps the most mythologized and misunderstood of American anthropology's interdisciplinary endeavors. Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, the two anthropologists most closely associated with “cultural and personality,” have often been understood to equate culture with personality.

While views of this sort are common, there is little, if any, evidence in Mead's writings or papers supporting such contentions; Mead used the rubric seldom, and then descriptively rather than methodologically. Despite clearly articulated differences in temporal scale, at best Benedict's writings show an analogy between personalities and cultures. Furthermore, such views are not easily reconciled with Benedict's and Mead's differing concepts of deviance.

Lawrence Frank, a sociologist at the Rockefeller Foundation, seems to have coined the phrase “culture and personality” for an interdisciplinary conference Mead attended in Hanover, New Hampshire, during the summer of 1934. Nonetheless, in April 1935, Mead wrote to John Dollard that Frank's phrasing seemed “ridiculous.” In a 1946 overview of the cultural study of personality, Mead held that the “and” that had been used to join the two distinct subjects had introduced a number of “methodological embarrassments.”

Instead of “culture and personality,” Mead preferred to discuss the “individual in culture.” As early as 1928, her work was replete with discussions of named individuals living in specified, described societies. Mead taught a seminar entitled “The Study of the Individual in Culture” in 1935. This emphasis upon the individual in culture should rightly be traced back to Edward Sapir.

In 1925, Sapir sought to keep Mead from undertaking research in Samoa, and she, equally resolutely, went off to her first fieldwork. This falling-out between Sapir and Mead along with Benedict continues to influence the development of psychological anthropology. To the extent that the writing of the history of anthropology is closely tied to the work of A. Irving Hallowell, this falling-out has also shaped anthropology's useable past.

Hallowell was an associate of Sapir's. His assessments of the field largely ignored Mead's contributions; Mead was not among those invited to contribute to a volume edited by Hallowell, among others, dedicated to Sapir's memory. Concomitantly, Mead elided the contributions of Hallowell, as well as others of Sapir's students and protegées, in her 1946 encyclopedia article.