Rochelle Walensky
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Robert Redfield was a U.S. cultural anthropologist who was the pioneer and, for a number of years, the principal ethnologist to focus on those processes of cultural and social change characterizing the relationship between folk and urban societies. A visit to Mexico in 1923 drew Redfield from law.
- Robert Redfield, Alfonso Villa Rojas
- 1934
May 23, 2018 · The American anthropologist Robert Redfield (1897-1958) specialized in Meso-American folk cultures. He was concerned with socially relevant applications of social-science skills and researches. Robert Redfield was born on Dec. 4, 1897, in Chicago, Ill., the son of an attorney.
Leaving the more narrowly defined field of folk and peasant studies, Redfield sought to understand the implications of wider cultural change. Influenced by the work of Milton Singer, Redfield began to synthesize anthropological studies into an historical study of civilization.
- Early Years
- Cultural Anthropology in Mexico
- The Folk-Urban Continuum
- Later Years
- Works by Robert Redfield
Robert Redfield was the son-in-law of University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park. In 1923 he and his wife Margaret traveled to Mexico, which aroused his interest in the country and its problems and he decided to pursue ethnology instead of law. There, he also met Manuel Gamio, a Mexican anthropologist who had studies with Franz Boas. Redfield...
He first researched Mexicans in Chicago, but soon returned to Mexico, where he began to be interested in the problems of folk societies. Results of his field endeavours appeared in Tepoztlán, a Mexican Village (1930), which gained prompt recognition as an innovative work. Further publications on this topic were “Chan Kom: A Maya Village” (1934), co...
In 1953 he published The Primitive World and its Transformation and in 1956, Peasant Society and Culture. Moving further into a broader synthesis of disciplines, Redfield embraced a forum for interdisciplinary thought that included archeology, anthropological linguistics, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and ethnology. Redfield wrote i...
Redfield’s later study of the civilizations of China and India, which he visited, suggested his concept of civilizations as cultural systems of interdependent, coexisting “great” and “little” traditions. He dealt with these concepts in The Little Community (1955) and Peasant Society and Culture(1956). Leaving the more narrowly defined field of folk...
Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village: A Study in Folk Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1930).Folk Cultures of the Yucatán. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1948).The Primitive World and Its Transformations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1953).However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity.
- Nicole Sackley
- 2012
In- deed, social anthropology, the sci- ence most identified with village studies, only began to explore peasant society 51 years ago. The pioneer was a young American, Robert Redfield. In 1926, at the age of 29, he spent 8 months in a village 50 miles south of Mexico City.
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Unhappy in his law career, Redfield contemplated becoming an anthropologist, and his father-in-law offered to fund a trip to Mexico so that Redfield could get a taste of field work before committing to an academic career.
