Robert Redfield
Robert Redfield ( born December 4, 1897 in Chicago, Illinois, † October 16, 1958 ) was an American anthropologist.
He studied at the University of Chicago Law and completed his studies in 1921. Around this time he married Margaret Lucy Park, with whom he had four children. Redfield worked only for a short time as a lawyer, but a trip to Mexico in 1923 sparked his interest in the country and its problems and he decided to pursue anthropology instead of Jura.
So he went back to the university in 1924, which was the beginning of a brilliant career. In 1928 he received his doctorate in 1930, he was appointed as associate professor at the new Department of Anthropology of the University. He has done research first about Mexicans in Chicago, but soon went back to Mexico, where he began to work for the problems of "folk societies" ( folk societies? ) To care. First publications on the subject were " Chan Khom " (1934 ) and " The Folk Culture of Yucatan " ( 1941).
From 1934-1946 he was a professor and dean of the social science department, 1946, he was President of the Department of Anthropology. In 1948, he traveled as a Fulbright scholar with his wife to China, where he worked as 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 the following years he taught and conducted research at various universities around the world and received various awards. Publications during this time were " The Primitive World and Its Transformations" (1953), "The Little Community " (1955) and " Peasant Society and Culture" (1956).
Around 1955 he was diagnosed with leukemia, which is why he had to severely restrict its activities. However, he was still a member of numerous societies, foundations and committees, continued to write in spite of all articles and essays, and held occasional lectures. On October 16, 1958, he died 60 years old.
Key terms
- "Folk -urban- continuum "
This model should show what changes are subject to rural communities, if they are larger and more complex. In the course of enlargement / urbanization they learn according to Redfield significant changes: There will be a " cultural disorganization "; this has the consequence that the Community, the original homogeneity is lost in that far-reaching cultural choices of the individual appear that the interdependence between the various cultural elements decreases and that there are conflicts due to different norms. In addition, the community is increasingly secularized and dominated by individualism. In its "pure" form is distinguished from the traditional community by a very homogeneous population living in geographical and social isolation, so that the different elements of their culture form a unified whole. The Community's focus is on the sacred character of social practices and the importance of the whole group is higher than that of the individual. On the other hand the urban community is characterized by cultural disorganization, secularism and individualism. The "folk culture" thus forms one pole as idealized abstraction of village culture in the folk -urban continuum - → relative isolation, strong social and cultural homogeneity, Gruppensolidariät, little change; the urban culture forms the opposite pole with opposite properties - ie strong networking, strong social and cultural heterogeneity, strong individualism, extreme changes subject. This model was later heavily criticized. For example, inquired the anthropologist Oscar Lewis 20 years after Redfield in the same area and came to very different findings than this. Nevertheless, Redfield model proved to be more helpful approach for the classification of peasant societies worldwide.
- Peasants
For Redfield peasants are farmers who live in a traditional community, but is already part of a more complex state structure. Peasant societies are thus a lower social class classified part of a stratified, partly already semi-industrialized society. Although they feel their country strongly connected and produce the greater part for their own use; However, they are already dependent to produce for the market - in contrast to the self-sufficient subsistence farmers. Redfield did with his concept of peasant culture offer an alternative to the usual binary distinction between " primitive" and "modern". He distinguished between an isolated primitive community, socially and culturally has no contacts outwards, whereas peasant communities are in contact with the outside world. However, you are not yet a part of the more "advanced " centralized civilization, but are on the edge and thus take an intermediate position between primitive and urban Communities, - so they occupy an intermediate position in the folk -urban- continuum.
- Vs. little. great traditions
Redfield called the culture of peasant societies "little traditions" that contain both elements of primitive cultures as well as elements of the "great tradition ", as they were to be found in the cities and among the intellectual elites. Nor can the font religions describe as great traditions, whereas the small traditions in everyday life can also contain elements of other cultures or religions (eg horoscopes / " Superstition ").