Patterns of Culture

An Enduring Classic

Ruth Benedict

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780547523927
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

An anthropologist compares three diverse societies in this groundbreaking, "unique and important" cultural study ( The New York Times ). A remarkable introduction to cultural studies, Patterns of Culture made history in exploring the role of culture in shaping our lives. In it, the renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict offers an in-depth look at three societies—the Zuñi of the southwestern United States, the Kwakiutl of western Canada, and the Dobuans of Melanesia—and demonstrates the diversity of behaviors in them. Benedict's groundbreaking study shows that a unique configuration of traits defines each human culture and she examines the relationship between culture and the individual. Featuring prefatory remarks by Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Louise Lamphere, who calls it "a foundational text in teaching us the value of diversity, " this provocative work ultimately explores what it means to be human. "That today the modern world is on such easy terms with the concept of culture... is in very great part due to this book." —Margaret Mead

IV

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The Pueblos of New Mexico

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THE Pueblo Indians of the Southwest are one of the most widely known primitive peoples in Western civilization. They live in the midst of America, within easy reach of any transcontinental traveller. And they are living after the old native fashion. Their culture has not disintegrated like that of all the Indian communities outside of Arizona and New Mexico. Month by month and year by year, the old dances of the gods are danced in their stone villages, life follows essentially the old routines, and what they have taken from our civilization they have remodelled and subordinated to their own attitudes.

They have a romantic history. All through that part of America which they still inhabit are found the homes of their cultural ancestors, the cliff-dwellings and great planned valley cities of the golden age of the Pueblos. Their unbelievably numerous cities were built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but we can follow their history much further back to its simple beginnings in one-room stone houses to each of which an underground ceremonial chamber was attached. These early Pueblo people, however, were not the first who had taken this Southwest desert for their home. An earlier people, the Basket-makers, had lived there so long before that we cannot calculate the period of their occupancy, and they were supplanted, and perhaps largely exterminated, by the early Pueblo people.

The Pueblo culture nourished greatly after it had settled upon its arid plateau. It had brought with it the bow and arrow, a knowledge of stone architecture, and a diversified agriculture. Why it chose for the site of its greatest development the inhospitable, almost waterless valley of the San Juan, which flows into the Colorado River from the north, no one ventures to explain. It seems one of the most forbidding regions in the whole of what is now the United States, yet it was here that there grew up the greatest Indian cities north of Mexico. These were of two kinds, and they seem to have been built by the same civilization at the same period: the cliff-dwellings, and the semicircular valley citadels. The cliff-dwellings dug into the sheer face of the precipice, or built on a ledge hundreds of feet from the valley floor, are some of the most romantic habitations of mankind. We cannot guess what the circumstances were that led to the construction of these homes, far from the cornfields and far from any water-supply, which must have been serious if they were planned as fortifications, but some of the ruins enduringly challenge our admiration of ingenuity and beauty. One thing is never omitted in them, no matter how solid the rock ledge upon which the pueblo is built: the underground ceremonial chamber, the kiva, is hewed out to accommodate a man upright, and is large enough to serve as a gathering-room. It is entered by a ladder through a hatchway.

The other type of dwelling was a prototype of the modern planned city: a semicircular sweep of wall that rose three stories at the fortified exterior and was terraced inward as it approached the underground kivas that clustered in the embrace of the great masonry arms. Some of these great valley cities of this type have not only the small kivas, but one great additional temple similarly sunk into the earth and of the most finished and perfect masonry.

The peak of Pueblo civilization had been reached and passed before the Spanish adventurers came searching for cities of gold. It seems likely that the Navajo-Apache tribes from the north cut off the supplies of water from the cities of these ancient peoples and overcame them. When the Spanish came, they had already abandoned their cliff-dwellings and great semicircular cities and had settled along the Rio Grande in villages they still occupy. Toward the west there were also Acoma, Zuñi, and Hopi, the great western Pueblos.

Pueblo culture, therefore, has a long homogeneous history behind it, and we have special need of this knowledge of it because the cultural life of these peoples is so at variance with that of the rest of North America. Unfortunately archeology cannot go further and tell us how it came about that here in this small region of America a culture gradually differentiated itself from all those that surrounded it and came always more and more drastically to express a consistent and particular attitude toward existence.

We cannot understand the Pueblo configuration of culture without a certain acquaintance with their customs and modes of living. Before we discuss their cultural goals, we must set before ourselves briefly the framework of their society.

The Zuñi are a ceremonious people, a people who value sobriety and inoffensiveness above all other virtues. Their interest is centred upon their rich and complex ceremonial life. Their cults of the masked gods, of healing, of the sun, of the sacred fetishes, of war, of the dead, are formal and established bodies of ritual with priestly officials and calendric observances. No field of activity competes with ritual for foremost place in their attention. Probably most grown men among the western Pueblos give to it the greater part of their waking life. It requires the memorizing of an amount of word-perfect ritual that our less trained minds find staggering, and the performance of neatly dovetailed ceremonies that are charted by the calendar and complexly interlock all the different cults and the governing body in endless formal procedure.

The ceremonial life not only demands their time; it preoccupies their attention. Not only those who are responsible for the ritual and those who take part in it, but all the people of the pueblo, women and families who ‘have nothing,’ that is, that have no ritual possessions, centre their daily conversation about it. While it is in progress, they stand all day as spectators. If a priest is ill, or if no rain comes during his retreat, village gossip runs over and over his ceremonial missteps and the implications of his failure. Did the priest of the masked gods give offence to some supernatural being? Did he break his retreat by going home to his wife before the days were up? These are the subjects of talk in the village for a fortnight. If an impersonator wears a new feather on his mask, it eclipses all talk of sheep or gardens or marriage or divorce.

This preoccupation with detail is logical enough. Zuñi religious practices are believed to be supernaturally powerful in their own right. At every step of the way, if the procedure is correct, the costume of the masked god traditional to the last detail, the offerings unimpeachable, the words of the hours-long prayers letter-perfect, the effect will follow according to man’s desires. One has only, in the phrase they have always on their tongues, to ‘know how.’ According to all the tenets of their religion, it is a major matter if one of the eagle feathers of a mask has been taken from the shoulder of the bird instead of from the breast. Every detail has magical efficacy.

Zuñi places great reliance upon imitative magic. In the priests’ retreats for rain they roll round stones across the floor to produce thunder, water is sprinkled to cause the rain, a bowl of water is placed upon the altar that the springs may be full, suds are beaten up from a native plant that clouds may pile in the heavens, tobacco smoke is blown out that the gods ‘may not withhold their misty breath.’ In the masked-god dances mortals clothe themselves with the ‘flesh’ of the supernaturals, that is, their paint and their masks, and by this means the gods are constrained to grant their blessings. Even the observances that are less obviously in the realm of magic partake in Zuñi thought of the same mechanistic efficacy. One of the obligations that rest upon every priest or official during the time when he is actively participating in religious observances is that of feeling no anger. But anger is not tabu in order to facilitate communication with a righteous god who can only be approached by those with a clean heart. It is rather a sign of concentration upon supernatural affairs, a state of mind that constrains the super-naturals and makes it impossible for them to withhold their share of the bargain. It has magical efficacy.

Their prayers also are formulas, the effectiveness of which comes from their faithful rendition. The amount of traditional prayer forms of this sort in Zuñi can hardly be exaggerated. Typically they describe in ritualistic language the whole course of the reciter’s ceremonial obligations leading up to the present culmination of the ceremony. They itemize the appointment of the impersonator, the gathering of willow shoots for prayer-sticks, the binding of the bird feathers to them with cotton string, the painting of the sticks, the offering to the gods of the finished plume wands, the visits to sacred springs, the periods of retreat. No less than the original religious act, the recital must be meticulously correct.

Seeking yonder along the river courses

The ones who are our fathers,

Male willow,

Female willow,

Four times cutting the straight young shoots,

To my house

I brought my road.

This day

With my warm human hands

I took hold of them.

I gave my prayer-sticks human form.

With the striped cloud tail

Of the one who is my grandfather,

The male turkey,

With eagle’s thin cloud tail,

With the striped cloud wings

And massed cloud tails

Of all the birds of summer,

With these four times I gave my prayer-sticks human form.

With the flesh of the one who is my mother,

Cotton woman,

Even a poorly made cotton thread,

Four times encircling them and tying it about their bodies,

I gave my prayer-sticks human form.

With the flesh of the one who is our mother,

Black paint woman,

Four times covering them with flesh,

I gave my prayer-sticks human form.

Prayer in Zuñi is never an outpouring of the human heart. There are some ordinary prayers that can be slightly varied, but this means little more than that they can be made longer or shorter. And the prayers are never remarkable for their intensity. They are always mild and ceremonious in form, asking for orderly life, pleasant days, shelter from violence. Even war priests conclude their prayer:

I have sent forth my prayers.

Our children,

Even those who have erected their shelters

At the edge of the wilderness,

May their roads come in safely,

May the forests And the brush

Stretch out their water-filled arms

To shield their hearts;

May their roads come in safely;

May their roads all be fulfilled,

May it not somehow become difficult for them

When they have gone but a little way.

May all the little boys,

All the little girls,

And those whose roads are ahead,

May they have powerful hearts,

Strong spirits;

On roads reaching to Dawn Lake

May you grow old;

May your roads be fulfilled;

May you be blessed with life.

Where the life-giving road of your sun father comes out,

May your roads reach;

May your roads be fulfilled.

If they are asked the purpose of any religious observance, they have a ready answer. It is for rain. This is of course a more or less conventional answer. But it reflects a deep-seated Zuñi attitude. Fertility is above all else the blessing within the bestowal of the gods, and in the desert country of the Zuñi plateau, rain is the prime requisite for the growth of crops. The retreats of the priests, the dances of the masked gods, even many of the activities of the medicine societies are judged by whether or not there has been rain. To ‘bless with water’ is the synonym of all blessing. Thus, in the prayers, the fixed epithet the gods apply in blessing to the rooms in Zuñi to which they come, is ‘water-filled,’ their ladders are ‘water-ladders,’ and the scalp taken in warfare is ‘the water-filled covering.’ The dead too come back in the rain clouds bringing the universal blessing. People say to the children when the summer afternoon rain clouds’ come up the sky ‘Your grandfathers are coming,’ and the reference is not to individual dead relatives but applies impersonally to all forbears The masked gods also are the rain and when they dance they constrain their own being—rain—to descend upon the people. The priests, again, in their retreat before their altars sit motionless and withdrawn for eight days, summoning the rain.

From wherever you abide permanently

You will make your roads come forth.

Your little wind blown clouds,

Your thin wisp of clouds

Replete with living waters,

You will send forth to stay with us.

Your fine rain caressing the earth,

Here at Itiwana,¹

The abiding place of our fathers,

Our mothers,

The ones who first had being,

With your great pile of waters

You will come together.

Rain, however, is only one of the aspects of fertility for which prayers are constantly made in Zuñi. Increase in the gardens and increase in the tribe are thought of together. They desire to be blessed with happy women:

Even those who are with child,

Carrying one child on the back,

Holding another on a cradle board,

Leading one by the hand,

With yet another going before.

Their means of promoting human fertility are strangely symbolic and impersonal, as we shall see, but fertility is one of the recognized objects of religious observances.

This ceremonial life that preoccupies Zuñi attention is organized like a series of interlocking wheels. The priesthoods have their sacred objects, their retreats, their dances, their prayers, and their year-long programme is annually initiated by the great winter solstice ceremony that makes use of all the different groups and sacred things and focuses all their functions. The tribal masked-god society has similar possessions and calendric observances, and these culminate in the great winter tribal masked-god ceremony, the Shalako. In like fashion the medicine societies, with their special relation to curing, function throughout the year, and have their annual culminating ceremony for tribal health. These three major cults of Zuñi ceremonial life are not mutually exclusive. A man may be, and often is, for the greater part of his life, a member of all three. They each give him sacred possessions ‘to live by’ and demand of him exacting ceremonial knowledge.

The priesthoods stand on the highest level of sanctity. There are four major and eight minor priesthoods. They ‘hold their children¹ fast.’ They are holy men. Their sacred medicine bundles, in which their power resides, are, as Dr. Bunzel says, of ‘indescribable sanctity.’ They are kept in great covered jars, in bare, inner rooms of the priests’ houses, and they consist of pairs of stoppered reeds, one filled with water, in which there are miniature frogs, and the other with corn. The two are wrapped together with yards and yards of unspun native cotton. No one ever enters the holy room of the priests’ medicine bundle except the priests when they go in for their rituals, and elder woman of the household or the youngest girl child, who go in before every meal to feed the bundle. Anyone entering for either purpose removes his moccasins.

The priests, as such, do not hold public ceremonies, though in great numbers of the rites their presence is necessary or they initiate essential first steps in the undertaking. Their retreats before their sacred bundle are secret and sacrosanct. In June, when rain is needed for the corn, at that time about a foot above the ground, the series of retreats begins. In order, each new priesthood going ‘in’ as the preceding one comes out, they ‘make their days.’ The heads of the sun cult and of the war cult are included also in this series of the priests’ retreats. They must sit motionless, with their thoughts fixed upon ceremonial things, eight days for the major priesthoods, four for the lesser. All Zuñi awaits the granting of rain during these days, and priests blessed with rain are greeted and thanked by everyone upon the street after their retreat is ended. They have blessed their people with more than rain. They have upheld them in all their ways of life. Their position as guardians of their people has been vindicated. The prayers they have prayed during their retreat have been answered:

All my ladder-descending children,

All of them I hold in my hands,

May no one fall from my grasp

After going but a little way.

Even every little beetle,

Even every dirty little beetle

Let me hold them all fast in my hands,

Let none of them fall from my grasp.

May my children’s roads all be fulfilled:

May they grow old;

May their roads reach all the way to Dawn Lake;

May their roads be fulfilled;

In order that your thoughts may bend to this

Your days are made.

The heads of the major priesthoods, with the chief priest of the sun cult and the two chief priests of the war cult, constitute the ruling body, the council, of Zuñi. Zuñi is a theocracy to the last implication. Since priests are holy men and must never during the prosecution of their duties feel anger, nothing is brought before them about which there will not be unanimous agreement. They initiate the great ceremonial events of the Zuñi calendar, they make ritual appointments, and they give judgment in cases of witchcraft. To our sense of what a governing body should be, they are without jurisdiction and without authority.

If the priesthoods stand on the level of greatest sanctity, the cult of the masked gods is most popular. It has first claim in Zuñi affection, and it flourishes today like the green bay tree.

There are two kinds of masked gods: the masked gods proper, the kachinas; and the kachina priests. These kachina priests are the chiefs of the supernatural world and are themselves impersonated with masks by Zuñi dancers. Their sanctity in Zuñi eyes makes it necessary that their cult should be quite separate from that of the dancing gods proper. The dancing gods are happy and comradely supernatural who live at the bottom of a lake far off in the empty desert south of Zuñi. There they are always dancing. But they like best to return to Zuñi to dance. To impersonate them, therefore, is to give them the pleasure they most desire. A man, when he puts on the mask of the god, becomes for the time being the supernatural himself. He has no longer human speech, but only the cry which is peculiar to that god. He is tabu, and must assume all the obligations of anyone who is for the time being sacred. He not only dances, but he observes an esoteric retreat before the dance, and plants prayer-sticks and observes continence.

There are more than a hundred different masked gods of the Zuñi pantheon, and many of these are dance groups that come in sets, thirty or forty of a kind. Others come in sets of six, coloured for the six directions—for Zuñi counts up and down as cardinal points. Each of these gods has individual details of costuming, an individual mask, an individual place in the hierarchy of the gods, myths that recount his doings, and ceremonies during which he is expected.

The dances of the masked gods are ad...