Robert Redfield was the anthropologist who tried hardest to give the transition from small community to city a single analytical shape. Where classical sociology had contrasted mechanical with organic solidarity, or community with association, Redfield proposed a graded scale — the folk-urban continuum — along which real settlements could be placed and compared. At one pole stood the folk society, an ideal type of the small, isolated, homogeneous and sacred community; at the other the city, with its heterogeneity, individuation and secular temper.
His second contribution was civilisational rather than typological. Working with Milton Singer at the University of Chicago, Redfield distinguished the great tradition of reflective, literate, priestly culture from the little tradition of local, oral, unreflective practice, and asked how the two interpenetrate in a literate civilisation. This distinction, more than the continuum, is what carried his name into Indian sociology.
Life and intellectual formation
Redfield was trained in law before turning to anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he spent his career and served as dean of the Social Sciences Division. His anthropology was thus shaped by the Chicago school of urban sociology — Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Ernest Burgess — and by the question that preoccupied it: what does the city do to human association? His marriage into Park's family sharpened that connection.
His fieldwork was Mexican. Tepoztlán, a Mexican Village (1930) described a peasant community in Morelos as a coherent, tradition-bound whole. He then designed the study that made his reputation: in Yucatán he compared four settlements — a tribal village, a peasant village, a town and the city of Mérida — treating them as points on a scale rather than as separate cultures. The Folk Culture of Yucatan (1941) reported the result: as one moved from the tribal settlement towards the city, cultural organisation loosened, the sacred receded, and individuation increased.
The folk society as an ideal type
The 1947 essay The Folk Society gives the pole its canonical statement. Redfield was explicit that no actual society answers the description; it is an ideal type, a mental construct against which real communities may be measured. Its features are:
- Small in scale, so that relations are face to face and everyone is known.
- Isolated, with little contact beyond its own boundaries.
- Non-literate, its knowledge carried by speech, memory and demonstration.
- Homogeneous, with slight division of labour and a shared way of life.
- Marked by a strong sense of group solidarity, kinship supplying the master idiom of social relations.
- Sacred rather than secular: conduct is governed by ritual and tradition rather than by calculation, and behaviour is spontaneous, uncritical and personal.
- Economically self-sufficient, with production for use rather than for a market.
The city is the systematic inverse — large, mobile, literate, heterogeneous, individuated, secular, impersonal, market-oriented. The continuum is the space between, and empirical societies occupy intermediate positions. Redfield's own Yucatán cases were meant to demonstrate that the intermediate positions can be ranked, so that urbanisation becomes a measurable process rather than a metaphor.
Little and great traditions
In The Primitive World and Its Transformations (1953) and in the comparative civilisations programme he ran with Singer, Redfield turned from the folk-urban scale to the internal structure of literate civilisations. A civilisation, he argued, has two levels of culture that are neither independent nor identical. The great tradition is cultivated in temples, schools and courts by priests, scholars and philosophers; it is written down, systematised, reflected upon, and carried by an elite. The little tradition lives in villages; it is oral, local, taken for granted, and carried by peasants and craftsmen.
The point of the distinction is the relation between the levels. Great-tradition doctrine seeps into local practice; local practice supplies material that literate specialists rework into doctrine. Redfield thought the two flowed constantly into one another, so that peasant religion is neither a fragment of scripture nor an independent survival. This is precisely the problem McKim Marriott took to a north Indian village and answered with the paired processes of universalisation and parochialisation.
Orthogenetic and heterogenetic change
Redfield's most useful device for the study of civilisational change distinguishes two sources of transformation. Orthogenetic change unfolds from within: the local tradition elaborates, refines and systematises its own materials, and cities that perform this work are cities of the moral order — administrative, priestly and scholarly centres that carry forward and codify an existing culture. Heterogenetic change comes from outside: new peoples, faiths, technologies, markets and ideas break in, and the cities that mediate them are cities of the technical order — commercial ports, colonial capitals, industrial centres — where old norms are questioned and new ones invented.
The pair allows a civilisation to be read historically. Ancient temple towns and seats of learning represent orthogenetic transformation; colonial port cities represent the heterogenetic kind. Applied to India, the contrast between a pilgrimage centre and a colonial commercial city has become a standard illustration in the sociology of Indian urbanisation.
Place in Indian sociology
Redfield never worked in India, yet the Chicago programme he directed made India its principal laboratory. Marriott's Village India (1955) was conceived within it, and the little and great tradition became one of the two or three most used frames for Indian religion and village life. The continuum also supplied a vocabulary for the study of Indian urbanisation and for debates about whether Indian cities produced the atomisation the model predicted — much subsequent research, on caste in cities and on rural-urban kinship networks, answered that they did not, at least not in the expected form.
Criticisms
The best-known challenge is methodological. Oscar Lewis restudied Tepoztlán and published Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlán Restudied (1951), reporting a community riven by factionalism, envy, litigation, violence and economic inequality — very nearly the opposite of Redfield's integrated whole. Lewis argued that Redfield's questions had been shaped by his typology: looking for the folk pole, he had found harmony and overlooked conflict. The Tepoztlán controversy became a classic case in the literature on ethnographic reliability, showing how far the observer's frame conditions the observation.
Related objections followed. The continuum romanticises the folk pole, presenting the small community as organic and contented and by implication treating urban life as loss. It is unilinear, implying that change runs in one direction from folk to urban, whereas actual histories show reverse and mixed movements. It treats the folk community as isolated, when peasant societies are typically bound into wider states, markets and religious systems — a point pressed later by peasant studies and by world-system approaches. The dichotomy is also too gross for stratified societies: within a single Indian village there are groups differing in literacy, wealth and ritual standing, so no one point on the scale describes it. Finally, the folk-urban framework says little about power, which is why Marxist critics find it descriptive rather than explanatory.
Legacy
Redfield's typologies are no longer used as he intended, but his questions remain in circulation. The little and great tradition survives as an indispensable shorthand; orthogenetic and heterogenetic change survives in urban history; and the folk society endures in teaching as the clearest available ideal type of pre-modern community. The Tepoztlán controversy, meanwhile, gave anthropology one of its most instructive lessons about the reflexivity of fieldwork.
For the UPSC answer
Redfield is examined chiefly through two devices, so keep both crisp. Give the folk society as an ideal type with its listed attributes — small, isolated, non-literate, homogeneous, kin-based, sacred, self-sufficient — and stress that the continuum is a scale, not a pair of boxes, illustrated by the four Yucatán settlements. For Indian relevance, move directly to little and great tradition and show how Marriott converted it into universalisation and parochialisation, and how it complements Srinivas on sanskritisation. Use orthogenetic and heterogenetic change when a question turns to urbanisation or to colonial impact. Always close with Oscar Lewis's restudy of Tepoztlán and the charge that the model romanticises the folk pole and neglects conflict, inequality and power.
References & further reading
- Redfield, Robert (1930). Tepoztlán, a Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Redfield, Robert (1941). The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Redfield, Robert (1947). The Folk Society. American Journal of Sociology, 52(4).
- Redfield, Robert (1953). The Primitive World and Its Transformations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- Redfield, Robert (1955). The Little Community: Viewpoints for the Study of a Human Whole. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Lewis, Oscar (1951). Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlán Restudied. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.