Patterns of Culture

Benedict’s second extended ethnographic case study focuses on a group of people, known as the Dobuans, who inhabit Dobu Island in Papua New Guinea. Their environment is harsh, consisting primarily of volcanic rock that accommodates little soil and, with its jagged terrain, makes fishing difficult. While Westerners consider Dobuans “poor,” in the eyes of their neighbors, they are “magicians who have diabolic power and warriors who halt at no treachery” (131). The Dobuans valorize these qualities. According to Benedict, they “put a premium upon ill-will and treachery” (131), and she devotes Chapter 5 to explaining these values through their social institutions.

For instance, Benedict describes the Dobu kinship system as centered on a group called the susu, or “mother’s milk.” As a matrilineage, the susu organizes and regulates all social, economic, and political life. The susu “own their gardens and their house-sites in a common village” and is the group that one turns to for moral and material support (132). Marital couples alternate every year where they reside—either with the husband’s or the wife’s susu—and so their status within a village is in constant flux. The susu typically accords respect and protection to its own members while it subjects everyone outside of the group to intense ridicule and abuse (137). 

These antagonistic relations extend to the economic base of the Dobuans’ subsistence. The susu allocates gardens and yam seeds, the main source of food for Dobuans (139). Spouses individually cultivate and fiercely protect their gardens, leading to intense suspicion, rivalry, and jealousy with each other and their neighbors. The prosperity of their gardens, meanwhile, is determined by magical charms and incantations passed down by the susu. Dobuans believe that every outcome, positive or negative, is the result of magic (142). It is acceptable within their society to use sorcery to defeat rivals, a practice that elevates their own status. Ultimately, Dobuans value the victimization of others for personal gain, and “anything that one can get away with is respected” (169), including murder (169).

Benedict’s third extended ethnographic case study focuses on the Kwakiutl people of Vancouver Island. Benedict chooses the Kwakiutl because previous scholars have studied them in depth. The comprehensive record of their cultural life differs from other coastal societies that, according to Benedict, are in “ruin,” although she does not explain the reasons for their decline.

Unlike the Zuñi of the American Southwest, the Kwakiutl and, more broadly, their surrounding communities are known for their ostentatious and competitive displays of prowess. For these reasons, Benedict describes the Kwakiutl culture as Dionysian (175). The economic practices of the Kwakiutl display their tendencies towards excess, as the men amass great quantities of wealth, primarily in the form of blankets, shells, etched sheets of copper, and distinguished titles, while the women contribute with baskets, mats, and more blankets (183). As Benedict writes, “Manipulation of wealth in this culture had gone far beyond any realistic transcription of economic needs and the filling of those needs. It involved ideas of capital, of interest, and of conspicuous waste” (188). The Kwakiutl cultural ideal, however, is not merely to amass wealth but to give it away and, if possible, to destroy it in a contest that publicly shames one’s rivals (189).

For Benedict, the speeches and songs given at the potlatch ceremonies of the Kwakiutl exemplify the “unabashed megalomania” and “uncensored self-glorification” of their Dionysian culture (190), and she devotes a substantial portion of Chapter 6 to recording these speeches and songs as well as narrating stories in which rivals increasingly outdo one another to prove their superiority. Yet, although the Kwakiutls’ destruction of property is seemingly excessive, Benedict notes that there are limits to their “conspicuous waste,” and they must not overdo it, especially chiefs, or else their subjects will no longer follow them. Benedict ends the chapter by explaining that what is deemed dangerous in one society, such as “megalomaniac paranoid” traits, may be accepted and idealized in another society—it just depends on what is valued by that society, as this sets the standard for what is considered normal or abnormal (222).