ABSTRACT
Two of Boas's most prominent students, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, developed a shared interest in psychology into the culture and personality orientation. Ruth Fulton Benedict entered graduate school at Columbia University and studied with Boas from 1919 until 1923, when she joined the faculty there in the Department of Anthropology. At the time that anthropologists were adapting Freudian theory to cultural analysis, his ideas were also becoming widely disseminated in American popular culture. The many problems with wartime national character studies illustrate flaws with culture and personality theories in general. Given these criticisms, readers might think that culture and personality and Freudian psychological anthropology expired with little or no lasting influence. The Melanesian society of Dobu presents a different picture altogether in its cultural configuration, one in which distrust and sorcery against all real and imagined enemies dominate. The behaviors that are selected are those conforming to the culture's configuration, by which she meant its overall psychological orientation.
