American anthropologist; student of Franz Boas; founder of the "culture-and-personality" school. Known for her two, extremely popular, books: Patterns of Culture, which is a comparative study of cultural configurations, of the cultural emotional order she referred to as ethos; and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a configurationalist study of Japanese culture, which was an outgrowth of a Second World War project, in which she cooperated with Margaret Mead and others in a study of various national cultures "at a distance".

To browse texts on AnthroBase dealing with Ruth Benedict, see:
http://www.anthrobase.com/Browse/Cit/B/ruth_benedict.htm