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

Case 10: The Folk Culture of Yucatan

Under the influence of Robert Park, who was both his teacher and his father-in-law, Redfield himself had already moved away from Boasian historicism toward a sociological anthropology with strongly evolutionary undertones. His fieldwork in Tepoztlan, Mexico (which Cole viewed as one of a series of "background" studies on the sources of American immigration), was the first anthropological study of a modern "peasant" community. Despite the fact that he was forced by revolutionary activity to remove his family to Mexico City, Tepoztlan became for Redfield the typical representation of the harmoniously integrated "folk society" which was the foundation of his subsequent work. Transposing the Tepoztecan descriptive adjectives tonto and correcto into social psychological types illustrating the diffusion of urban values, Redfield suggested that the "disorganization and perhaps the reorganization" of Tepoztecan culture under "the slowly growing influence of the city" exemplified a general process by which "primitive man becomes civilized man, the rustic becomes the urbanite."

Early in 1930 Redfield went to Yucatan, where the Carnegie Institution of Washington was considering plans to broaden its ongoing archaeological research to include the ethnology and linguistics of present-day Yucatan. Despite strong fears that "sociological" research might jeopardize its "delicate" position in the area, the Institution decided to fund Redfield's plan for a comparative study of four contemporary communities at different points along a scale of modernization. The most intensive work was done in Chan Kom, where the local school teacher, Alfonso Villa Rojas, was hard at work "civilizing" the Mayans - introducing among other things the foxtrot and the "Black Bottom." Recruited by Redfield to collect ethnographic data and to keep a diary of daily events, Villa Rojas subsequently became the first in a long series of Latin American and Third World anthropologists to receive graduate training in the Department.

In 1935 the Mayan project was ex tended to Guatemala by Sol Tax. Unexpectedly he found himself work ing among Indians who, "far from resembling" Redfield's typical folk culture, "actually fit the criteria by which a city-type is judged." Responding to these and other issues raised by Tax's work, Redfield himself carried on extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, where he wrote much of the manu script for The Folk Culture of Yucatan. His basic model of cultural change along a folk-urban continuum - an intellectual inheritance from Park which he shared with Louis Wirth in sociology - was not substantially modified. At the same time, Redfield had become increasingly interested in the analysis of culture as an ideational phenomenon, emphasizing "the quality of organization and inner consistency" unifying the "mental world of the participant in a well-established community."

At the end of World War II, changes in Carnegie Institution policy brought the Yucatan project to an end. By that time, Redfield felt that his work had played a major role in establishing modern Middle American social anthropology, both in terms of the training of personnel and the collection of ethnographic data - although publication lagged consistently behind. The status of the whole venture as a contribution to "the scientific study of society," however, was questioned by various critics in the early 1950s after a restudy of Tepoztlan by Oscar Lewis, who emphasized internal community conflict and the hardships of peasant life. Having retreated from his earlier scientism toward a more humanistic anthropology which recognized the role of the investigator's own value commitment, Redfield suggested that his "emotional involvement" in Tepoztlan was perhaps less than Lewis', since 11 my glands are older."

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