[2] She can be viewed as a transitional figure in her field for redirecting both anthropology and folklore away from the limited confines of culture-trait diffusion studies and towards theories of performance as integral to the interpretation of culture.

[3] Fulton loved his work and research, but they eventually led to his premature death, as he acquired an unknown disease during one of his surgeries in 1888.

[6] His illness caused the family to move back to Norwich, New York, to the farm of Ruth's maternal grandparents, the Shattucks.

Accompanied by two girls from California whom she had never met, Katherine Norton and Elizabeth Atsatt, she traveled through France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and England for one year with the opportunity of various home-stays throughout the trip.

She first tried paid social-work for the Charity Organization Society; later she accepted a job as a teacher at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, California.

[8] However, through reading authors like Walt Whitman and Richard Jefferies, who stressed a worth, importance, and enthusiasm for life, she held onto hope for a better future.

[8] The summer after her first year teaching at the Orton School, she returned home to the Shattucks' farm to spend some time in thought and peace.

That summer, Ruth fell deeply in love with Stanley as he began to visit her more, and she accepted his proposal for marriage.

[4] Invigorated by love, she undertook several writing projects to keep busy besides the everyday housework chores in her new life with Stanley.

In her search for a career, she decided to attend some lectures at the New School for Social Research while looking into the possibility of becoming an educational philosopher.

Benedict wrote her dissertation, "The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America," and received the PhD in anthropology in 1923.

[3] Benedict also started a friendship with Edward Sapir, who encouraged her to continue the study of the relations between individual creativity and cultural patterns.

However, the administration of Columbia was not as progressive in its attitude towards female professionals as Boas had been, and the university president, Nicholas Murray Butler, was eager to curb the influence of the Boasians whom he considered to be political radicals.

Instead, Ralph Linton, one of Boas's former students, a World War I veteran and a fierce critic of Benedict's "Culture and Personality" approach, was named head of the department.

[21] Before World War II began, Benedict had been giving lectures at the Bryn Mawr College for the Anna Howard Shaw Memorial Lectureship.

Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) was translated into fourteen languages and was for years published in many editions and used as standard reading material for anthropology courses in American universities.

In contrast, the worshipers of Dionysus, the god of wine, emphasized wildness, abandon, and letting go, like Native American groups living on the Great Plains.

Benedict was a senior student of Franz Boas when Mead began to study with them, and they had extensive and reciprocal influence on each other's work.

Abram Kardiner was also affected by these ideas, and in time, the concept of "modal personality" was born: the cluster of traits most commonly thought to be observed in people of any given culture.

As she described the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest (based on the fieldwork of her mentor Boas), the Pueblo of New Mexico (among whom she had direct experience), the nations of the Great Plains, and the Dobu culture of New Guinea (regarding whom she relied upon Mead and Reo Fortune's fieldwork), she gave evidence that their values, even where they may seem strange, are intelligible in terms of their own coherent cultural systems and should be understood and respected.

However, Benedict had already assisted in the training and guidance of several Columbia students of anthropology including Margaret Mead and Ruth Landes.

[27] Benedict was among the leading cultural anthropologists who were recruited by the US government for war-related research and consultation after the US entered World War II.

One of Benedict's lesser-known works was a pamphlet "The Races of Mankind," which she wrote with her colleague at the Columbia University Department of Anthropology, Gene Weltfish.

The pamphlet was intended for American troops and set forth in simple language with cartoon illustrations the scientific case against racist beliefs.

We all have just so many teeth, so many molars, just so many little bones and muscles, and so we can have come from only one set of ancestors, no matter what our color, the shape of our head, the texture of our hair.

Unable to visit Nazi Germany or Japan under Hirohito, anthropologists used the cultural materials to produce studies at a distance.

They attempted to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression and hoped to find possible weaknesses or means of persuasion that had been missed.

Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding Japanese culture, which had matters that Americans found themselves unable to comprehend.

Sections of the book were mentioned in Takeo Doi's book, The Anatomy of Dependence, but Doi is highly critical of Benedict's concept that Japan has a "shame" culture, whose emphasis is on how one's moral conduct appears to outsiders in contradistinction to the Christian American "guilt" culture in which the emphasis is on the individual's internal conscience.

The prize recognizes "excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topic.