Date:         Thu, 2 Mar 2000 02:52:11 -0600
From:         Mike Salovesh <t20mxs1@CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU>
Subject:      Redfield's folk-urban continuum

Joe Heyman said:

> It's also worth commenting the problematic status of "urban."  This is
> obviously a response to "folk" as in folklore.  A parallel move was made
> long ago by Robert Redfield in the folk-urban continuum (and I won't
> comment on what acronym grad students have given that one).  Redfield had
> the beneficial effect of setting off a long tradition of very fine work on
> cities, much of which does indeed address the city-ness of the topic.  But
> Redfield's notion that there was a folk and that its polar opposite was
> urban was quickly discovered to be misleading on both ends.  The analogy to
> urban folklore is apt--what is referred to as "folk" lore is usually the
> patterned, orally transmitted artistry of poor peasants, tribal peoples,
> and rural folk in economically stagnant areas generally, who the "folk."
> But then "urban" lore has nothing to do with being urban so much as it has
> to do with patterned, orally transmitted artistry of people who occupy more
> dominant positions in terms of status, occupations (offices, email, etc.),
> locations (suburbs as much or more than cities), commodity consumption
> (SUVs and other car-jacking anxieties, etc.), and so forth.

Sorry to disagree, but once in a while I am troubled by how far
summaries of Redfield's ideas depart from what Redfield actually said --
not to mention how far they depart from what Redfield taught.

Where I'm coming from: Most of what I learned about social and cultural
anthropology while I was a student was strongly influenced by the three
anthropologists who were my special mentors: Redfield, Eric Wolf, and
Tom (Lloyd A.) Fallers.  I had taken courses from Redfield, and he had
become my advisor, before Eric Wolf joined the faculty at Chicago.
Redfield died while I was on my first field trip; Wolf served on my M.A.
committee when I returned.  Eric then left Chicago.  I had been Fallers'
TA during a year I spent at Berkeley, and when Tom came to Chicago he
agreed to serve on my doctoral committee.  I owe more than I can say to
each of these great men.  It is no reflection on Eric or Tom that our
first-born son was named David Robert (David for himself, Robert for
Redfield); in my family, you don't name a child after a living person.
Our son's middle name does tell you how I felt about Redfield while I
was writing my dissertation.

In his seminal article, "The Folk Society" (American Journal of
Sociology, 1940) and in the longer consideration Redfield gave to the
idea in __The Folk Culture of Yucatan__, Redfield carefully pointed out
that when he talked about both "folk" and "urban" he was talking about
the poles of a theoretical construct, not about real cultures/societies.
It's a conceptual, not a descriptive, model. He repeatedly said that the
apparent dichotomy is the same kind of distinction others made with such
ideas as Gemeinschaft as opposed to Gesellschaft, mechanical versus
organic solidarity, and other conceptualizations on a macro level.
There is no real society that totally fits the "folk society" model, and
there is no real society that entirely fits the "urban society" model.
Not according to Redfield, anyhow.

It wasn't Redfield's intent to be misleading or confusing on this
point.  The problem didn't lie in Redfield's notion, since he explicitly
denied that ANY society was entirely folk-like or entirely urban. Any
real society, he said, has to lie somewhere between the two poles.
Assertions that such-and-such a society was wholly "folk" or wholly
"urban" would be alien to what Redfield was talking about.  (The title
of __The Folk Culture of Yucatan__ , in fact, is clearly contadicted by
the content of the book.) From the beginnning, there never was any lack
of other writers who misunderstood Redfield on this point: such
misunderstandings first appeared in the SOCIOLOGY journal where he
published the original article.

I have commented, elsewhere, that there's nothing particularly difficult
in saying that Society X is more folk-like than Society Y -- provided
that you restrict that statement to a single dimension of variation.  It
would be easy to support a statement like "Society X is more folk-like
in the way it deals with kinship than Society Y".  You could do so
without having to imply that either kinship system is totally like what
would be expected in Redfield's ideal model of a folk society.
Redfield's models are ideal types.  He's talking about tendencies for a
society to be more like one pole than the other, rather than about
saying that the society IS either folk or urban.

Problems with Redfield's notion begin with the realization that it's
entirely possible that there is a Society X whose kinship system is more
folk-like than that of Society Y -- and that at the same time the
political system of Society Y could be more folk-like than the political
system of Society X.  In short, what Redfield proposed in his folk-urban
continuum actually tries to mix several separate continuua into a single
measure. I think that was a mistake.  If I were to compare two societies
with regard to which was more folk-like, which more urban-like, than the
other, I would limit myself to a single dimension of variation. I don't
want to foreclose the possibility that I might have to rank the same two
societies differently along another, independent dimension of variation
that also goes from folk to urban.

It's a lot more comfortable to stick to comparing apples with apples,
rather than comparing apples with horse-apples. (Does anybody out there
remember what was meant by "horse-apples"?)

It helps to put Redfield's contrast of folk and urban as ideal types in
the context of then-recent developments in anthropology.  Up through the
mid-1930s, social/cultural anthropologists tended to view themselves as
people who study "primitive" peoples and cultures. (That was their
vocabulary, not mine, so don't jump on me for saying "primitive" here.)
More than half a century of saying that the world's "primitive" cultures
were fast disappearing did a pretty good job of convincing
anthropologists that it was true.  Unfortunately, anthropologists were
practically the only people in the dominant, NON-primitive world who saw
that as a problem.

What anthropologists said to the rest of the world about there being any
problems with the possibility that "primitive" cultures were
disappearing was a credit to their sensitivities to the rights of
people  who weren't like those of their own culture.  But that's not the
whole story.

One of the less openly discussed reasons social/cultural anthropologists
saw problems in the perceived disappearance of "primitive" peoples and
cultures was fear that the subject matter of their kind of anthropology
might be disappearing at the same time. The idea that this was some kind
of threat was enhanced by the customary attitude that conceived of a
culture as the intellectual property of the first anthropologist to
describe it. (It just wouldn't be polite or collegial to go back to
Ungo-Bungo when we already had good old Zz's monograph on Ungo-Bungo
culture.  Doing a restudy might be taken to imply that the original
study was botched, and that good old Zz was really a no-good.)  It
looked like the day was pretty close when all the good cultures would be
"taken".  If that day came, it would be very hard to justify training
any new anthropologists dedicated to studying "primitives" . . .  and a
lot of teaching anthropologists would lose their jobs.

In the middle 1930s, two committees of the  American Anthropological
Association
directly faced up to some of the problems involved in the alleged
disappearance of cultures for anthropologists to study.  In the process,
they deliberately and consciously rewrote the commonly-accepted charter
of social and cultural anthropology. Influential symposia that came out
of these committees permanently changed the old vision that the only
place to do anthropology was among "primitive" people.

The committee that's directly relevant included Redfield as a prominent
participant. They argued strongly that there were very good reasons why
anthropology should begin to study peasant societies and cultures in
addition to our traditional concern with "primitives".  Once the idea
took hold that it was good for anthropology to look at what Kroeber
called "part-societies with part-cultures", the danger that
social/cultural anthropology might put itself out of business even
before the disappearance of the last "primitive" culture evaporated. In
fact, the logical extension of this new charter opened the door for
anthropologists to investigate industrial societies and so-called
"modern" cultures without having to become sociologists.

Just saying that it was all right for anthropologists to look at peasant
societies and cultures did not provide a good theoretical basis for
doing so.
Redfield's "folk-urban continuum" was one of the first attempts to
justify the new anthropological charter for peasant studies.

Eventually, Redfield, Singer, and others came up with ideas that were
both more broadly based and yet more specifically useful for studies of
peasants: the idea of contrasts between Great Traditions and Little
Traditions.  That's still a dichotomy of ideal types, of course.  Its
advantage lies in its explicit recognition that the opposing poles of
this dichotomy are in direct interaction and have significant influences
on each other.

That's exactly what you learn when you study peasant-like societies.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh@niu.edu>
PEACE !!!