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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.
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
Clifford Wilcox's exploration of Redfield's pioneering efforts to develop an empirically based model of the transformation of village societies into towns and cities is intended to recapture the questions that drove early development of modernization theory.
- 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).Robert Redfield (December 4, 1897 – October 16, 1958) was an American anthropologist and ethnolinguist, whose ethnographic work in Tepoztlán, Mexico, is considered a landmark of Latin American ethnography.
Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology. <em>American Anthropologist</em> is the flagship anthropology journal of the AAA, publishing articles that add to, integrate, synthesize, and interpret anthropological knowledge.
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On 13 December 1948, University of Chicago anthropologist Robert Redfield boarded one of the last American flights to depart Beijing before the armies of Mao Zedong took control of the city.
