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 immensely to the understanding of various cultures; this culminated in her book, The City of Women, a work that has since been translated into Portuguese and praised for the provocative nature with which it captures society. To know Landes' purpose, however, you need to know his motivation for the research and the theory behind it. In this essay I will explore Landes's theory of society and how it relates to her work, while also attempting to contextualize Landes as an anthropologist. This will be done through the discussion of Landes' relationship to the theory of cultural relativism. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Landes studied with Ruth Benedict, a student of the Boasian tradition, as well as with Boas himself. Barnard states that “classical cultural relativism emerged from the work of Franz Boas and his students.” It would be wrong to assume that Ruth Landes would not follow suit since her mentor at Columbia University, Ruth Benedict herself, had studied with Boas; this assumption remains valid despite Landes's eventual movement beyond the concept of cultural integration – the belief that each culture was composed of pre-established models – declaimed by Benedict, in Landes's “attention to the individual” and his “modernist concern and sentiments ”. Cultural relativism seeks to explain culture through its own lens; 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 that we can identify throughout Landes' research. We can see this omission of comparison with other societies in Landes' work with the indigenous Ojibwa of Canada; he defines the existing society as isolated due to the unique interactions he observed there, and later does not attempt to contextualize them relative to the societies he observed later in his fieldwork. Sally Cole discusses 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 – furthering the idea of ​​Landes' individualistic approach to society, while 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 the Latin Americans of the Southwest (Landes 1965, 81), and the Ojibwa people of Canada. It is clear that Landes' primary methodology was fieldwork, as each of her research works focuses on the interaction between various individuals and how these interactions she observed defined each society. Landes also collected ethnographies regarding various behaviors; these ethnographies considered the impact of “power and cultural change” on a society. Since Benedict urged Landes to look for models within a given culture, Landes could not; he found this to be untrue to his research, as many individuals within a given society were ignorant of a general rule to ensure personal preferences. Because of the way Landes conducted her research, she arrived at definitions of culture based on interactions unique to the society she sought to define, whichthey catered to each society's unique social structure. The use of this personal methodology allows Ruth Landes' work to fall within the definition of cultural relativism. Throughout Landes' work, one important factor remains consistent: his vision of society. One can describe each of his books by describing society as a “social space” generated based on the different roles of those interacting in an individual context. This can be seen in the different ways Landes describes various societies; it is always careful to explain them in terms of their relevance and not in terms of another. In her work with the Ojibwa of Canada, Ruth Landes outlines the workings of their society in a way that describes the different roles of men and women without making any comparison; this makes the research unique to the Ojibwa as Landes intended, as their society is a “cooperative economy in the most individualistic terms”; this individuality and isolation extends from the economy into the social sphere of Ojibwa society. Furthermore, it is within Ojibwa society that Landes found he needed to move beyond the work of his mentor Ruth Benedict; he could not force Ojibwa behaviors to fit a cultural pattern, as individuals often behaved unpredictably and thus deviated from expected behavioral mechanisms. Therefore, as cited by Sullivan, Landes believes that the social space of the Ojibwa is defined by a lack of interaction, distinctive of the social space that Landes defined of isolated Brazilians in her book, City of Women. The Brazilians from Bahia researched by Landes rely on each other, so the social sphere is assumed to be much richer, as is society itself. Thus, we know that Landes defines society on the basis of individual social interactions within a given group, in direct relation to the previously established idea of ​​Landes's relationship to cultural relativism - that is, he adhered to that theory by focusing on individual and on modernist sentiment. . Further delving into the contextualization of Landes' ideas, we must consider the theory of evolutionism and the merit it had in the context of anthropology when Landes was active, as this was a theory that Boas himself struggled with. Evolutionism is, at least according to the Boasian tradition, in conflict with cultural relativism. As established earlier in this essay, cultural relativism is the relevant theory within 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 harbored due to the association. According to Boas, evolutionism is irrelevant to anthropology, since anthropologists should be concerned with the present and not the past of the cultures they are studying. Furthermore, Boas argued that evolutionism is full of “racial and cultural superiority” that weakens the position of the theory itself. Since Landes sought to show the importance of various cultures of different races through her work, it would be wrong to assume that she turned a blind eye to the racist implications existing within evolutionism. This can be seen in the following quote from Landes' major work, The City of Women: “I cannot draw solemn conclusions from my observations in Bahia. In retrospect, life there seems remote and timeless. I was sent to Bahia to learn how people behave when the Negroes among them are not oppressed. I found that they were oppressed by political and economic tyrannies, though not by racial ones… just like other poor people among them of different racial origins.” From this text we discover that Landes not only considered different.