"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 16: From Folk Societies to Great Traditions

Responding to war-born anxieties about the fate of modern civilization and to wartime "area programs" which seemed to him intellectually insubstantial - as well as to the inner development of his own inquiry - Redfield in the late 1940s moved beyond the study of "folk societies" to the "great traditions" in which these societies were encompassed. Redfield defined civilization in terms of the displacement of the characteristics of an ideal-typical "primary" society (isolation, homogeneity, etc.) by their opposites. He hoped that a comparative study of the actual "constellations of characteristics" produced historically by this transformation would permit generalization about the circumstances "that tend to give rise to a civilization." Alongside (and to some extent in tension with) this neo-evolutionary approach, he was also interested in characterizing cultures as wholes in terms of their fundamental values or modes of thought. With the help of Milton Singer, a philosopher and social psychologist with whom he had been associated in the social science program of the College, Redfield spent the year 1954-51 studying recent works on national character and cultural values as well as the writings of sinologists and other scholars of nonWestern civilizations. That spring, he submitted a proposal for the comparative study of "great traditions" to his friend Robert Hutchins, who had left the University for the Ford Foundation. Funded by the Foundation, Redfield's "Program in Intercultural Studies" sponsored a wide range of activities, as the proposed titles in the monograph series "Comparative Studies of Cultures and Civilizations" suggest. After establishing "lines of communication" with scholars in America and Europe, several interdisciplinary conferences were held on problems in the study of major non-Western civilizations. Harking back to the interests of his teacher and colleague Sapir, Redfield also prompted Harry Hoijer to organize a symposium on language and culture, at which the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the correspondence of language patterns and world views was the focus of a provocative if inconclusive discussion. By this time, the concept of "world view" - "the very outlook of men on their own world" - had become central to Redfield's project. Several of his students were sent to Middle America in an "attempt to stimulate investigations which would not impose upon primitive societies our analytical categories," but which would produce instead "the most other-centered ethnology of which we can conceive."

Meanwhile, Redfield and Singer had instituted a seminar on "The Comparison of Cultures," which was successively devoted to general methodological issues, to the applicability of the world view concept to folk cultures in the process of transformation, and to the comparison of Islamic and Western civilizations. In the spring of 1954, a number of anthropologists who had recently worked in India, including Bernard Cohn and Warner's student McKim Marriott, were invited to treat the "problem of the relation of a small community like the village to the larger civilization of which it is the periphery." As the project began thus to encompass independent ethnographic studies of particular villages within a larger civilization, the broadly comparative neoevolutionary approach of Redfield's Primitive World and Its Transformations tended to be transformed into more historical or synchronic studies of civilization "from the bottom up." By 1955, Singer, urging that "what is now needed . . . to advance the work in the characterization and comparison of civilizations is a concrete and detailed example of developed method for at least one civilization," suggested a five-year study of India.

Although the onset of Redfield's fatal illness forestalled his own participation in the Indian research, and the proposed manual for a comparative social anthropology never appeared, the Ford project left enduring fruit. New courses in non-Western civilizations were introduced into the University's undergraduate programs; furthermore, a strong South Asian Studies center was established at Chicago. Eventually, this broadly inclusive enterprise encompassed the Philippine Studies Program which Fred Eggan had founded in 1952 - a more modestly budgeted outgrowth of the wartime area studies movement.

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