When a person in any culture has contempt, the opposites of difference and sameness are seen in a terrible, false way: one looks down on others and does not see how they are LIKE oneself. And this makes oneself feel bad. Native Americans of the Northwest Coast are described as swinging from arrogance to self-abasement: "from triumph to shame" (Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, p. 220). This is how I felt. It is a notable fact that people of the Northwest coast came to an art form that criticizes what they were doing as a society, and as people. They created a design which, Franz Boas.
