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 (Tepoztlán, Chan Kom), 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.

The papers of Robert Redfield and Margaret Redfield are located at the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

[edit] Further Reading

Redfield, Robert 1930 Tepoztlan, a Mexican village: A study in folk life Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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

Redfield, Robert 1956 The little community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rees, David 2006 The Peasant View of the Good Life: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and F. G. Freidmann. New Brunswick, NJ:Transaction Publishers.

Rubinstein, Robert A. 2001 Doing Fieldwork: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Wilcox, Clifford 2006 Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology (Second, Revised Edition. Lexington Books.