"Mrs. Landes Meet Mrs. Benedict": Culture Pattern and Individual Agency in the 1930s

This article presents Ruth Landes as a transitional figure in 20th-century anthropology between the culture and personality studies of the interwar years and the study of power and structural dynamics so important in the discipline by the end of the century. Expanding on Benedict's theory of culture pattern and employing the life history method, Landes highlights in her work relations of power in the structural dynamics of culture as she explores: the experience of social marginality; the making of the public symbolic order; the plurality of local knowledge systems; the role of the individual; what she called "the moot problem of women and men"; and the relationship of researcher and researched. [Keywords: Ruth Landes, Ruth Benedict, culture, gender, power]