Ruth Landes was an American anthropologist who revolutionized the way the relationship between culture and power structures was studied in the field of anthropology. The Landes have contributed enormously to the understanding of various cultures; this resulted in her book, The City of Women, a work which has since been translated into Portuguese and praised for the provocative nature in which it captures society. However, to know Landes' goal, one must know his motivation for the research and the theory behind it. In this essay, I will explore Landes' theory of society, how it relates to his work, while also seeking to contextualize Landes as an anthropologist. This will be done through the discussion of the relationship of Landes with the theory of Cultural Relativism. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay. Landes studied under Ruth Benedict, a student of the Boasian tradition – as well as Boas himself. Barnard states that "classical cultural relativism arose from the work of Franz Boas and his students." It would be wrong to assume that Ruth Landes would not have followed suit since her mentor at Columbia University, Ruth Benedict herself, had studied under Boas; This hypothesis remains valid despite Landes' eventual movement beyond the concept of cultural integration – the belief that every culture consisted of established patterns – expressed by Benoît, in Landes's "emphasis on the individual" and his “modernist concerns and sentiments”. Cultural relativism seeks to explain culture through its own prism; that is, in the theory of cultural relativism, beliefs and ideals are to be understood on the basis of an individual culture and not on the contextualization of that culture in relation to another. This is a common theme found throughout Landes research. This omission of comparison with other societies can be seen in Les Landes' work with the indigenous Ojibwa of Canada; she defines the existing society as isolated because of the unique interactions she observed there, and does not later seek to contextualize them in relation to the societies she later observed in her fieldwork. Sally Cole explains in the American Anthropologist that Landes anthropology is a view of the differences between those who live peacefully within a given society and those who do not – reinforcing the idea of ​​the individualist approach landaise of society, while simultaneously providing the concept of existing power structures to consider. Landes arrived at her conclusions through extensive fieldwork – immersing herself in each culture she studied; this can be seen through his work with the Brazilian people of Bahia, his study of Latin Americans in the Southwest (Landes 1965, 81), and the Ojibwa people of Canada. It is clear that Landes' primary methodology was fieldwork, since each of her research focuses on the interaction between various individuals and how those interactions she observed define each society. Landes also collected ethnographies surrounding various behaviors; these ethnographies considered the impact of “power and cultural change” on a society. While Benedict XVI urged the Landes to look for models within a given culture, the Landes could not; she found that this did not fit her research because many individuals within a given society would ignore a general rule intended to secure their personal preferences. Because of the way Landes conducted hisresearch, she arrived at definitions of culture based on interactions specific to the society she sought to define, which responded to the unique social structure of each society. The use of this personal methodology allows Ruth Landes' work to fit into the definition of cultural relativism. Throughout Landes' work, one important factor remains constant: his vision of society. Each of his books can be described as describing society as a "social space" generated from the different roles of those who interact in an individual setting. This can be seen in the different ways Landes depicts different societies; she always takes care to explain them according to their own relevance, and not in the terms of another. In her work with the Ojibwa of Canada, Ruth Landes describes the functioning of their society in a way that describes the different roles of men and women while not relying on any comparisons; this makes the research unique to the Ojibwa, as the Landes desired, because their society is a “cooperative economy in the most individualistic terms”; this individuality and isolation extends from the economy to the social sphere of Ojibwa society. Additionally, it was within Ojibwa society that Landes discovered she needed to go beyond the work of her mentor Ruth Benedict; it could not force Ojibwa behaviors to fit a cultural pattern, because individuals often behaved unpredictably and therefore deviated from predicted behavioral mechanisms. Thus, as Sullivan mentioned, Landes finds that the social space of the Ojibwa is defined by a lack of interaction – distinct from the social space that Landes defined for isolated Brazilians in her book, City of Women. The Brazilians in Bahia studied by Landes are dependent on each other, so the social sphere is assumed to be much richer, as is society itself. Therefore, we know that Landes defines society on the basis of individual social interactions within a given group, directly relating to the formerly established idea of ​​Landes' relationship to cultural relativism -i.e. say that she adhered to this theory with its emphasis on individual and modernist feeling. . In further contextualizing Landes's ideas, we must consider the theory of evolutionism and its merit in the context of anthropology when Landes was active – as it was a theory that Boas himself fought against. Evolutionism is, at least in the Boasian tradition, in conflict with cultural relativism. As established earlier in this essay, cultural relativism is the relevant theory in Landes' work; It is important to consider Boas's objections to evolutionism in relation to cultural relativism, as these would have been the feelings Landes felt as a result of the association. According to Boas, evolutionism has no relation to anthropology, because anthropologists should be concerned with the present and not the past of the cultures they study. Additionally, Boas argued that evolutionism is rife with "racial and cultural superiority" that weakens the position of the theory itself. While Landes sought to show the importance of the diverse cultures of different races through her work, it would be incorrect to assume that she turned a blind eye to the racist implications existing within evolutionism. This is evidenced by the following quote from Landes' most significant work, La Cité des femmes: “I cannot draw any solemn conclusion from my observations in Bahia. In retrospect, life there seems distant and timeless. I was sent to Bahia to learn how people behave when the blacks among them don't.