Ruth Benedict's Theory Of Modal Culture

Her most important and controversial contribution was her argument for the study of entire cultures, she called” Modal Personality. Every culture, she thought, is molded in a single form or model, that is, it is organized around a central cultural ethos and, consequently, is a fully integrated configuration or. Although individual members in these cultures may differ in their personalities, the cultural system tends to push toward an ideal personality type. Those whose personality is compatible with the cultural ideal should be the happiest and best suited to society.
For her, each of the cultures make a different selection of natural potentialities of human beings, giving prominence to certain potential in successive generations and even
It is not enough to divide perceptions objectives fragments. The subjective structure, forms given by previous experience, they are crucial and cannot be omitted. "
Ruth Benedict (1934), Patterns of culture: 51/182.
Benedict devotes the last chapter of Patterns of culture to the conflict that sometimes occurs between the individual's personality and values of their culture. Although it is common for individuals to adapt to the model of their culture, coming to see it as the most appropriate, there are also people who turn away from him. The deviation is something that depends on the cultural model and not the person. The Zuni having Dionysian behavior near the Dobu will be seen as deviant in their culture, while the same will happen among those Dobu showing a more Apollonian temperament.

"The tribes have described all have their individuals 'abnormal' non-participants. The individual Dobu totally clueless was the friendly man by nature and he believed that the activity was an end in itself. It was a friendly fellow who did not seek to defeat or punish their colleagues.
In the approach to culture that Benedict not only cultural models are relative, but also the deviation from them. Thus Benedict is one of the first anthropologists who raises the issue of the relationship between culture and personality.
Each of the three cultures described has certain ends which is directed behavior and tending their institutions. As set they differ in their features but mostly because they are oriented in different directions. The means and ends of a society cannot be judged in terms of the other, because they are incommensurable.
In some cultures, certain social orders not subordinate activities to a guideline motivation. This lack of integration seems to be so characteristic of certain cultures as far as integration is another. This is because not everywhere the same circumstances. Each form itself a complex and its own goals and motivations are. No psychological expression appears as the dominant feature in the culture as a