Robert Redfield (ethnologist)

Robert Redfield (born December 4, 1897 in Chicago , Illinois , † October 16, 1958 ) was an American ethnologist .

Life

He studied at the University of Chicago Law completed his studies in 1921 and closed. Around this time he married Margaret Lucy Park, with whom he had four children. Redfield only worked as a lawyer for a short time, but a trip to Mexico in 1923 piqued his interest in the country and its problems and he decided to pursue ethnology instead of law.

So he went back to university in 1924, which was the beginning of a brilliant career. He received his doctorate in 1928, and in 1930 he was appointed associate professor at the university's new Department of Anthropology. He first did research on Mexicans in Chicago, but soon traveled back to Mexico, where he began to be interested in the problems of "folk societies". The first publications on the subject were "Chan Khom" (1934) and "The Folk Culture of Yucatan" (1941).

From 1934 to 1946 he was professor and dean of the social science department, and in 1946 he became president of the Department of Anthropology. In 1948 he traveled to China with his wife on a Fulbright scholarship, where he was a visiting professor at the University of Peiping. Due to the establishment of the Communist People's Republic in 1949, however, he had to leave the country very soon. In 1947 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and in 1950 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In the following years he taught and researched at various universities around the world and received various awards. Publications during this period were "The Primitive World and Its Transformations" (1953), "The Little Community" (1955) and "Peasant Society and Culture" (1956).

Around 1955 he fell ill with leukemia, which is why he had to severely limit his activities. However, he was still a member of numerous societies, foundations and committees, despite everything he continued to write articles and essays and occasionally gave lectures. He died on October 16, 1958 at the age of 60.

Central terms

• "Folk-urban-continuum"

This model should show how rural communities are changing as they become larger and more complex. According to Redfield, they experience significant changes in the course of enlargement / urbanization: “cultural disorganization” occurs; This has the consequence that the original homogeneity of the community is lost, that far-reaching cultural choices of the individual emerge, that the interdependence between the various cultural elements decreases and that there are conflicts due to different conceptions of norms. In addition, the community is becoming increasingly secularized and shaped by individualism. In its “pure” form, the traditional community is characterized by a very homogeneous population that lives in geographical and social isolation, so that the various elements of their culture form a unified whole. The focus of the community is on the sacred character of social practices and the value of the whole group is higher than that of the individual. On the other hand, the urban community is characterized by cultural disorganization, secularity and individualism. The “folk culture” thus forms one pole as an ideal-typical abstraction of village culture in the folk-urban continuum → relative isolation, strong social and cultural homogeneity, group solidarity, little change; urban culture forms the opposite pole with opposite properties - d. H. strong networking, strong social and cultural heterogeneity, strong individualism, subject to extreme changes. This model was later also heavily criticized. For example, the ethnologist Oscar Lewis researched 20 years after Redfield in the same area and came to completely different findings than this. Still, Redfield's model proved to be a helpful approach to classifying peasant societies around the world.

• peasants

For Redfield, peasants are farmers who live in a traditional community that is already part of a more complex state structure. As a socially lower class, peasant societies are part of a stratified, sometimes semi-industrialized society. They do feel strongly connected to their country and produce for the most part for their own use; However, they are already dependent on producing for the market - in contrast to self-sufficient subsistence farmers. With his concept of peasant culture, Redfield wanted to offer an alternative to the usual binary distinction between “primitive” and “modern”. He distinguished between an isolated primitive community that has no social and cultural contacts with the outside world, whereas peasant communities are in contact with the outside world. However, they are also not yet part of the “more advanced” centralized civilization, but rather stand on its fringes and thus occupy an intermediate position between primitive and urban communities - they therefore occupy a middle position in the folk-urban continuum.

• little vs. great traditions

Redfield called the culture of peasant societies "little traditions", which contain elements of primitive cultures as well as elements of "great traditions" such as can be found in the cities and among the intellectual elites. The scriptural religions can also be described as great traditions, whereas the small traditions in everyday life can also contain elements from other cultures or religions (e.g. horoscopes / "superstition").

literature

• Fay-Cooper Cole and Fred Eggan: Robert Redfield, 1897-1958. In: American Anthropologist. 61. 1959, pp. 652-662.
• GM Foster: Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good. In: American Anthropologist. 67. 1965, pp. 293-315.
• M. Singer: Robert Redfield's Development of a Social Anthropology of Civilizations. In: JV Murra (Ed.): American Anthropology: the early years. St. Paul 1976, pp. 187-60.

Web links

• Robert Redfield in the Encyclopædia Britannica

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member History: Robert Redfield. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 21, 2018 .