Aftershocks of Relativity

The essay pursues a rereading of Benedict's Patterns of Culture as her probing experiment in search of a temporality appropriate to her aspirations for ethnography. Read between the lines of various of her sources—works by Durkheim, Boas, Einstein, and Bergson—the originality of Patterns is its unfolding of relativity as a series of temporal formulations. In this regard, she brought her powerful ethnographic imagination to bear on the question of what time it is that sustains relativity's ethical and intellectual promise. The purpose of my own experiement with Patterns is not to establish definite connections between her readings and writings, questions and answers, but to grasp something of the bold creativity of her engagement.