Ruth Benedict: “Patterns of Culture”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Three

“A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. Each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives, the heterogenous items of behaviour take more and more congruous shape.

Such patterning of culture cannot be ignored as if it were an unimportant detail. The whole, as modern science is insisting in many fields, is not merely the sum of all its parts, but the result of a unique arrangement and interrelation of the parts that has brought about a new entity.”

― Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture

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