DANIEL ROSENBLATT An Anthropology Made Safe for Culture: Patterns of Practice and the Politics of Difference in Ruth Benedict ABSTRACT In this article I focus on the problem of reconciling analytic and descriptive attention to cultural distinctiveness with the problems posed for it by contemporary globalization and our desire not to efface the agency of those we study. Boasians generally saw no contradiction between cultural contact and cultural integration. Ruth Benedict especially understood our tendency to link agency and individuality as ethnocentric—people made their cultural worlds even as they were profoundly shaped by them. Current discomfort with the “culture” concept has its roots in a Hegelian mistrust of particularism that pervades even self-consciously antifoundational thought. Drawing on Johann Gottfried Herder, Benedict offers an alternative way of thinking about agency and society, and, thus, a distinctively anthropological contribution to critical thought. Because we cannot understand people’s political practice without understanding where they are coming from, cultural description must remain on the agenda of any politically engaged anthropology. [Keywords: Benedict, culture, agency, globalization, Maori] Our earth is a star among stars. —Johann Gottfried Herder, 1966[1784] POLITICS AND CULTURE In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1974), Ruth Benedict contrasted herself with those who argued “that all the dif- ferences between East and West, black and white, Christian and Mohammedan, are superficial and that all mankind is really like-minded” (1974:14–15). “To demand such unifor- mity as a condition of respecting another nation is,” she said, “as neurotic as demanding it of one’s wife or one’s chil- dren” (1974:14–15). Her goal, instead, was “a world made safe for differences” (1974:14–15). Benedict’s main contri- bution to this project was to popularize the concept of “culture”: If people in other societies differed from “us,” the cause was not their inferiority or their backwardness; rather, it was their adherence to a different way of life, ori- ented toward different values and embodied in different customs and institutions. If some people found it hard to measure up, it might result from of an unfortunate mis- match between their proclivities and the arbitrary standards of the society in which they happened to find themselves. “Culture” was thus anthropology’s contribution to political American Anthropologist, Vol. 106, Issue 3, pp. 459–472, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C  2004 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. struggles against racism, colonialism, and enforced social conformity. “Culture” was also anthropology’s contribution to so- cial theory. People lived in a variety of cultural worlds: The things they did and the things they wanted had to be un- derstood within those worlds. More inclusive than the hu- manities notion of “culture,” which centered on expressive works, the anthropological term included any “socially in- herited element in the life of man, material and spiritual” (Sapir 1949:309). It implied that all that people did and made would repay scholarly attention. Studies of “popular culture” and “social history” have their roots in this an- thropological interest in what Benedict referred to as “the trivial details of daily intercourse” (1974:11). If today we seek to understand who we are by the clothes we wear or the things we watch on television, our practice owes some- thing to Benedict’s insistence that “human behavior in any primitive tribe or in any nation in the forefront of civiliza- tion is learned in daily living” (1974:11) and that “homely matters ... have more to do with [a] nation’s future than treaties signed by diplomats” (1974:11). If an idea that so undercuts the notion of social evolution can be said to be progressive, then culture was progressive. Lately, all this has changed, and the politics of employ- ing the term culture have been stood on their head. Even