Robert Redfield

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Robert Redfield (December 4, 1897 - October 16, 1958) was an American anthropologist and ethnolinguist. (He is not to be confused with the virologist of the same name.) Redfield graduated from the University of Chicago, eventually with a JD from its law school and then a PhD in social anthropology, which he began to teach in 1927. After a series of published field studies from Mexican communities, 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, Dr Redfield embraced a forum for interdisciplinary thought that included archeology, anthropological linguistics, physical anthropology, social anthropology, and ethnology.

Redfield wrote in 1955 about his own experience doing research in Latin America on peasants. As he did research, he realized he had been trained to treat the society as an isolated culture. However, he found people were involved with trade, and there were connections between villages and states. More than that, the village culture was not bounded. Beliefs and practices were not isolated. Redfield realized it did not make sense to study people as isolated units, but rather it would be better to understand a broader perspective. Traditionally, anthropologists studied folk ways in the "little tradition", taking into account broader civilization, the "great tradition".

Redfield and his wife Margaret are the parents of James M. Redfield, a professor of classics at the University of Chicago.

Further reading:

Redfield, Robert 1948 Folk Cultures of the Yucatan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.