Anthropology as a Weapon of War and Peace: Ruth Benedict on National Character

Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) is not well-known as an influential thinker in the history of international thought, in spite of her fame as a key figure in the history of Anthropology in the United States, alongside her more famous student, colleague, lover and friend, Margaret Mead (1901-1978) (Janiewski and Banner, 2004). This remains the case even though the relation between the discipline of Anthropology and military operations came under the spotlight in International Relations (IR) and Strategic Studies following the invasions, insurgencies and counterinsurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

At that time, debates raged about the complicity of Anthropology with US counterinsurgency policy, the need for reassertion of professional integrity in response to militarisation, but also about how lack of anthropological understanding of local culture undermined military effectiveness, and ways in which better Anthropology might have saved lives and prevented more violence. These debates inspired scrutiny of ways in which Anthropology's history was bound up with the state, foreign policy and war. And drew attention to previous controversies in the history of Anthropology, from the condemnation of anthropologists acting as spies in World War One to the furore over military uses of anthropological knowledge in Vietnam and Latin America in the 1960s and 70s, to Anthropology's intimate relation with US and European imperialism (McFate 2005; Robben 2010; Gusterson 2015). However, with some exceptions, (notably Mandler 2013) less attention has been paid to the role played by Anthropology in the US war effort in World War Two, and to the legacies of a particular way of thinking about 'culture' that continue to resonate in recent debates about US military strategy and beyond.

The interwar period saw the rise of cultural Anthropology as the predominant disciplinary approach in the United States, under the leadership of Franz Boas (1858-1942). Cultural Anthropology was characterised by two features, faith in ethnographic research as the key to understanding 'primitive' societies and cultural relativism. Cultural relativism meant that the values, habits and institutions of all societies were constructed, not natural, and that they had to be understood from within. They could not appropriately be measured or judged from an external perspective. The point of ethnography was to give the researcher insight into internal cultural logics of the society being studied, and to remove the anthropologist as far as possible from their own pre-existing cultural biases. Benedict, initially a student of Boas and then a leading scholar in the field, developed these ideas and in collaboration with Mead and others, made connections between individual and collective levels of identity. This led to claims about a link between individual psychological traits, for example tendencies towards competitive or collaborative behaviour, and the institutional character of particular societies, as captured in their socialisation practices and belief systems.   

In the 1920s and 1930s, the practice of Anthropology in the US had become more distanced from its origins in the service of colonial administration and expansionist foreign policy. The assumptions of racial hierarchy were increasingly challenged, notably by Benedict herself, who, against Nazi ideology in particular, argued for the understanding of 'race' as a social construction, and for 'culture' as the fundamental category through which the world should be understood (Benedict 1934; 1940). Nevertheless, the main focus of anthropological research remained societies defined as 'other' to American modernity, usually small-scale, and studied through long-term ethnographic research. This changed radically with the approach of World War Two. Suddenly, US anthropologists wanted to reverse their withdrawal from involvement with the state to help fight the war. Benedict, Mead and a host of other scholars were recruited to work in what became the Office of War Information (OWI). A crucial part of this aspect of the war effort was the application of the idea of 'national character' as a weapon of both war and peace.

The idea of 'national character' was based on established assumptions in Cultural Anthropology that there was an intimate relation between collective and individual identity that arose through cultural socialisation processes, particularly in the upbringing of children. Originally, of course, this idea had developed with regard to small societies with particularly cohesive cultures, rather than to nation states. Nevertheless, Benedict and her colleagues claimed that with appropriate adjustments, this insight could be generalised to the level of national collectives. Fundamentally, because cultures were different, national characters were different. Unless the internal logic of a culture was understood ('cracked' as Mead put it) then strategic mistakes could be made, both in the conduct of war and in peace-making and peacebuilding. For Benedict and her colleagues, anthropological research was key to grasping the collective and individual psychology of allies as well as enemies, which meant it was key for understanding what would boost morale at home and undermine it in enemy territory, and for understanding what kinds of insurgency work might be effective and what might not. Unfortunately, the kind of long-term ethnographic research that had been the hallmark of cultural Anthropology was not possible in the context of war. In response to this, Benedict and her colleagues developed tools for the study of culture 'at a distance' (Mead and Métraux 2000 [1953]). For example, Benedict made use of testimony of Japanese immigrants and prisoners of war, and of interpretations of Japanese history, film, literature and propaganda in her research into Japanese national character, commissioned at the point at which Allied victory in the Pacific became certain.

My assignment was difficult. America and Japan were at war and it is easy in wartime to condemn wholesale, but far harder to see how your enemy looks at life through his own eyes. Yet it had to be done. The question was how the Japanese would behave, not how we would behave if we were in their place. I had to try to use Japanese behaviour in war as an asset in understanding them, not as a liability. I had to look at the way they conducted the war itself and see it not as a military problem but as a cultural problem. (Ruth Benedict The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Naples Albatross Publishers, 2019 [1946]: 5)

Benedict's analysis of Japanese culture in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which was based on OWI research, has been credited with directly influencing the exception of the Japanese Emperor from the terms of the surrender. She certainly saw it as a contribution towards the possibility of sustainable peace, not only with Japan but as exemplifying the acceptance of cultural pluralism necessary for a future world order based on understanding and tolerance of national difference. It remains the most famous text arising out of the application of the idea of national character in pursuit of Allied goals in World War Two, and became a bestseller after its publication in 1946. It has also become the most controversial of Benedict's texts and continues to be heavily contested in terms of the accuracy of its reading of the meaning of being Japanese, as well as the validity of its method. More generally, the usefulness of the idea of national character came under increasing scrutiny in the wake of Benedict's death in 1948. A younger generation of social scientists were unconvinced by the impressionistic, ungeneralizable methods used by Benedict to 'crack' other cultures. They argued for more systematic approaches to social research, and challenged deep cultural relativism, replacing cultural Anthropology's assumptions with the universals of rationalism and behaviouralism (Mandler 2013). At this point, as the Cold War unfolded, the application of Anthropology in the service of the state became subsumed under new fields of Area and Development Studies. Nevertheless, even though the idea of national character became academically discredited, it has persisted in repeated constructivist and cultural turns in the practice, as well as the academic study, of world politics. 

Benedict and her colleagues invented the idea of the cultural construction of nation-state identity, in which the state takes on a particular character, and the idea of the link between individual and collective identity which has become part of common-sense understandings of the world. The problems of applying concepts developed in the study of small, tightly knit societies to large-scale, diverse communities are obvious. Nevertheless, the idea of national character continues to seduce analysts and practitioners of foreign policy and military strategy, and to frame popular accounts of contemporary issues and events, from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to Brexit.  

References

Ruth Benedict Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).

Ruth Benedict Race, Science and Politics (New York: Viking Press, 1940).

Ruth Benedict The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Naples: Albatross Publishers, 2019 [1946]).

Hugh Gusterson "Ethics, Expertise and Human Terrain", in Trine Villumson Berling and Christian Bueger (eds) Security Expertise: practice, power, responsibility (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).

Dolores Janiewski and Lois W. Banner (eds) Reading Benedict, Reading Mead: feminism, race and imperial visions (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Peter Mandler Return from the Natives: how Margaret Mead won the Second World War and lost the Cold War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013).

Montgomery McFate "The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture", Joint Force Quarterly 38 3 (2005): 42-48.

Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux (eds) The Study of Culture at a Distance (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000 [1953]).

Antonius C G. M. Robben (Ed) Iraq at a Distance: what anthropologists can teach us about war (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).