shrinking," begin Benedict and Weltfish. "Thirty-four nations are now united in a common cause—victory over Axis aggression, the military destruction of fascism" (p. 1). The nations united against fascism, they continue, include "the most different physical types of men." The writers explicate, in section after section, their best evidence for human equality. They want to encourage all types of people to join and not fight among themselves. "[A]ll the peoples of the earth," they point out, "are a single family and have a common origin." We all have just so many teeth, so many molars, just so many little bones and muscles, and so we can have come from only one set of ancestors, no matter what our color, the shape of our head, the texture of our hair. "The races of mankind are what the Bible says they are—brothers. In their bodies is the record of their brotherhood." The Chrysanthemum and the Sword Benedict is known not only for her earlier Patterns of Culture but also for her later book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the study of the society and culture of Japan that she published in 1946, incorporating results of her wartime research. This book is an instance of anthropology at a distance. The study of a culture through its literature, newspaper clippings, films and recordings, etc. was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its allies during World War II. Unable to visit Nazi Germany or Japan under Hirohito, anthropologists used the cultural materials to produce studies at a distance. They attempted to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression and hoped to find possible weaknesses or means of persuasion that had been missed. Benedict's war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding Japanese culture, which had matters that Americans found themselves unable to comprehend. For instance, Americans considered it quite natural for American prisoners-of-war to want their families to know they were alive and to keep quiet when asked for information about troop movements, etc. However, Japanese prisoners-of-war apparently gave information freely and did not try to contact their families. Why was that? Why, too, did Asian peoples neither treat the Japanese as their liberators from Western colonialism nor accept their own supposedly-just place in a hierarchy that had Japanese at the top? Benedict played a major role in grasping the place of the Emperor of