On the eve of American involvement in World War II, Gregory Bateson
and Margaret Mead had turned to the cultural dimensions of international
relations ( Yans-McLaughlin 1986). As early as 1939, shortly after their
return from Bali, they worked with Eliot Chapple, Lawrence K. Frank,
and others in the Committee for National Morale, and established
guidelines for the collection of life-histories from European and Asian
informants ( Mead 1974:57). Ruth Benedict, whose frequent absence
from Columbia on sabbatical or visiting teaching assignments prevented
the escalation of hostilities with Linton ( Modell 1983:258), ¹ joined Mead
and Bateson in 1941 in organizing the Council for Intercultural Relations
(later Institute for Intercultural Studies).

With the curtailment of fieldwork possibilities for the duration of the
war, Benedict and Mead spearheaded a shift from studying small-scale
tribal societies to the "study of culture at a distance" -- more specifically,
to the "national character" of European and Asian nations drawn into the
world conflict. Benedict moved at the end of 1942 to Washington, D.C.,
where she replaced Geoffrey Gorer as a consultant to the Office of War
Information ( Mead 1974:58). For the next two years, supplementing
library research with interview materials, she prepared several briefs on
the national character of various Asian and European countries, notably
Rumania, Thailand, and Burma ( Modell 1983:270). In perhaps the first
major study in the emerging "national character" field, Mead applied
Benedict's configurationist orientation to the description of American
cultural themes and personality traits in And Keep Your Powder Dry
( 1942b). Meanwhile, Bateson, who had earlier described the
complementary ethoses of Iatmul males and females in Naven ( 1936),
elaborated his concept of recurrent polarities in interpersonal relations

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