Redfield, Robert (1897–1958)

U.S. anthropologist

Robert Redfield made major contributions to social theory in cultural anthropology, primarily during the 1940s and 1950s. After studying both biology and philosophy and practicing law, he received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1928 from the University of Chicago, where he later became professor of anthropology and dean of the social sciences division. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Redfield chose not to study isolated primitive societies or to compare present civilizations. Instead, his early field research focused on small, contemporary Mexican communities that were open to outside cultural influences. As a result, Redfield developed a hypothetical “folk-urban continuum,” a dynamic interpretation of cultural changes and social relationships among tribal, peasant, town, and city communities. Redfield held the prototypical folk society to be small, homogeneous, immersed in the sacred, and exhibiting strong interpersonal bonds. In sharp contrast, he characterized the prototypical urban society as large, heterogeneous, secular, and exhibiting formal, impersonal relationships among individuals.

An outgrowth of his field research on an Aztec community near Mexico City, Redfield's first book, Tepoztlán (1930), took a functionalist approach to this peasant community—one that had been changing due to contact with urban industrial civilization. The book's holistic orientation to the study of culture was similar to the anthropological approach found in Bronislaw Malinowski's work in the Trobriand Islands and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's study in the Andaman Islands. Next, Redfield under-took a comparative analysis of the folk-to-urban transition [Page 1150]in Yucatán peasant communities undergoing social change. His field research produced Chan Kom (1934) and The Folk Culture of Yucatán (1941). Later, in A Village That Chose Progress (1950), Redfield stressed the social changes that had taken place in Chan Kom since his own anthropological work there in the early 1930s.

During the last ten years of his life, Redfield not only taught at the University of Chicago but also lectured at other colleges and universities in the United States, Puerto Rico, Europe, India, and China. He organized academic seminars and established research projects that enabled anthropologists and humanists to collaborate on the comparative study of modern civilizations. These professional activities resulted in numerous publications, including The Primitive World and Its Transformations (1953), The Little Community (1955), and Peasant Society and Culture (1956). His focus had shifted from peasant societies to more modern civilizations—and to the ways in which traditional folk cultures coexist with modernity in those communities. Expanding this orientation, he analyzed types of cities and the processes of urbanization.

Into his comparative and interdisciplinary studies of societies in transition, Redfield incorporated an evolutionary approach to cultural history, interpreting its trends from the Paleolithic era to our own. (As such, his analyses foreshadowed the evolutionary perspectives of cultural anthropologists Leslie A. White and Marvin Harris.) His pragmatic philosophy emphasized the value of science, reason, education, and democratic dialogue, while acknowledging the primary importance of community to the human condition. After his death in 1958, a two-volume collection of his papers was edited by his widow, Margaret P. Redfield, and published in 1962–1963.