Ruth Benedict and Cultural Relativism

We came upon a paragraph in  Ruth Benedict's "Anthropology and the Abnormal" at our meeting last month so astonishing as an example of the idea of cultural relativism.  It describes anthropologist Reo Fortune's field work in Melanesia in a society "built upon traits which we regard as beyond the border of paranoia," in which nastiness among people, especially ones from different family groups, prevails.  Benedict writes,

Now in this society where no one may work with another and no one may share with another, Fortune describes the individual who was regarded by all his fellows as crazy. He was not one of those who periodically ran amok and, beside himself and frothing at the mouth, fell with a knife upon anyone he could reach.  Such behavior they did not regard as putting anyone outside the pale.  They did not even put the individuals who were known to be liable to these attacks under any kind of control.  They merely fled when the saw the attack coming on and kept out of the way. "He would be alright tomorrow." But there was one many of sunny, kindly disposition who liked work and liked to be helpful.  The compulsion was too strong for him to repress it in favor of the opposite tendencies of his culture.  Men and women never spoke of him without laughing; he was silly and simple and definitely crazy.  Nevertheless, to the ethnologist used to a culture that has, in Christianity, made his type the model of all virtue, he seemed a pleasant fellow.