Ruth Benedict identified two types of personalities which include, Dionysian and Apollonian. She is of the view that t "different cultures create different personality traits."

She set out a number of different cultural configurations in her book, showing how for example, the Zuñi interpreted everything that happened to them in terms of perceptual modes that privilege order, conformity, and temperance - she called this the Apollonian configuration - whereas the Plains Indians interpreted life in polar opposite terms, namely that what matters most in life are personal experiences of excess - the Dionysian configuration.

Not to be missed here, is her characterization of modern American culture. In line with other Boasian anthropologists of her day, she was critical of self-congratulatory Americans, as if Americans were destined for greatness. She turned her cultural explanation back onto us and interpreted our dominant configuration as, neither Apollonian nor Dionysian, but as paranoid megalomania, comparable in many respects to the Kwakiutl of the northwest coast for whom victory over others is everything.

Robert Pirsig is critical of Benedict's wholism because it describes cultural life in static terms. The Apollonian is distinct from the Dionysian and, in a sense, fixed in that distinctiveness. However and without denying the worth of Pirsig's criticism, I have contended that Benedict moved boldly out and away from some even more problematic views of her day, views, for example, that credited isolated individuals with extraordinary powers (agency) such as the power to have cultural traits. She grafted some budding Modernist insights onto notions drawn from gestalt psychology and arrived at a sophisticated view of human social life. She did not always spell out her views with consistency, but, as often happens, pioneering proposals are often filled with confusions that subsequent scholarship, less creative but more fastidious, must clean up.