Social Anthropology

Robert Redfield

Kevin Jack Riley, Clifford Wilcox

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138514621
• eBook ISBN: 9781351490566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Robert Redfield is remembered today primarily as an anthropologist, but during his lifetime Redfield's cross-disciplinary activity reflected a strong interest in infusing anthropological practice with sociological theory. Like a handful of other anthropologists, including A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski, who shared his interests during the 1920s through 1930s, his works came to define a new subfield known as social anthropology.Redfield was distinct in being one of the first Americans to devote himself seriously to social anthropology, a field dominated initially by British scholars. He spent his career at the University of Chicago, and his anthropology bore the distinct mark of sociology as developed and practiced at that institution. Indeed, Redfield played a major role in defining what has been called the second Chicago school of sociology. This volume brings together Redfield's most important contributions to social anthropology.During the 1920s, sociology and anthropology constituted a single department at the University of Chicago. Although most students concentrated on sociology or anthropology, Redfield chose to pursue both fields with equal intensity. He adopted as his central interest the leading problematic of the 1920s: the study of social change. Chicago School sociologists approached social change by examining zones of rapid transition within the city, for example, areas populated by recently-arrived immigrants, with the goal of elucidating general principles or dynamics of social transition.Redfield's work can be seen as falling into three distinct theoretical categories: (1) the study of social change or modernization; (2) peasant studies; and (3), the comparative study of civilizations. Drawing from articles, book excerpts, and unpublished papers and letters, this work presents Redfield's central contributions in each of these areas. Seen as a whole, this volume traces Redfield's seminal contributions to the early development of mo

Part I
Modernization

1
Anthropology, A Natural Science?

Redfield published “Anthropology, A Natural Science?” while still in graduate school. Largely influenced by his father-in-law Robert E. Park, Redfield expressed here conceptions of both anthropology and sociology that would inform his work over the course of most of his career. Redfield argued that while during the 19th century anthropology had proceeded according to the methods of natural science, the discipline had shifted toward a historical approach in the early 20th century. Redfield attributed this shift primarily to the influence of Franz Boas, who had opposed the generalizing or scientific approach of the nineteenth century because it was so closely associated with racist social evolutionary notions. Redfield suggested, however, that as of the first decades of the 20th century, a resurgent scientific trend could be discerned within anthropology and that the discipline now stood at a crossroads between the historical and scientific approaches. He concluded by arguing, as had Robert E. Park, that anthropology could advance scientifically most effectively by aligning itself with sociology, the lead organizing social science. Essentially, anthropology could by most productive, he proposed by harnessing its on-the-ground empirical techniques to gather facts and data that could then by useful to the generalizing efforts of sociology. This article provides a clear statement of the generalizing law-seeking approach that would guide Redfield’s work in social anthropology over the course of his entire career.

Science, broadly speaking is the systematic investigation of observed phenomena. It is recognized that this investigation may be directed towards one of two distinct and opposable ends. It may be the aim of such investigation to discover and set out specific sequences, temporal or spatial, of objects and events. History and geography are scientific disciplines of this sort. They are sometimes called descriptive sciences. In fact all sciences are descriptive, but the events or objects of the historical-geographical sciences are described as they are encountered in time or space, and each datum is unique and not subject to verification.

The term natural science, on the other hand, is often reserved for scientific investigation that seeks to classify data and to reduce a wide range of observed phenomena to a brief statement or formula. This formula is termed a natural law. It is, of course, not a law at all: it compels nothing. It is merely a shorthand description of phenomena observed to recur.¹ It is the processual counterpart of the generic concept. It is tested pragmatically, not by any standard of absolute truth.² Physics and chemistry are sciences of this sort.

Among recent general sociological books, this distinction is explicitly set forth in Park and Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology, pp. 12-24, and is recognized in C. M. Case, Outlines of Introductory Sociology, xvi-xvii.

But while the facts of history and of natural science are of distinct characters, history and natural science do not remain distinct, but in certain regions of inquiry the one tends to become the other. Geography, in its established phase, is a purely descriptive (i.e., depictive) science, but nevertheless it is forever tending to reduce its data to types and is thus forever passing over into natural science.³ Even the historians do not in every case confine themselves to events. In becoming a “comparative historian,” Professor F. J. Teggart has sought to “do for human history what biologists are engaged in doing for the history of the forms of life.”⁴ So he calls his book The Processes of History. History, to him, is to become a natural science, i.e., sociology.

From the point of view of this distinction, it is interesting to consider the methods of anthropology. Unlike sociology, anthropology has no roots in philosophy. It arose out of a scientific interest in primitive and prehistoric man. Anthropological science thus grew up around a body of materials and not around a defined method. For this reason its relation to history and to natural science did not at once become clear. Its interest in this connection lies in the fact that anthropological method has been both that of history and that of a natural science. Certain of its workers and certain of its schools have inclined to one of the two methods, while others have inclined to the other. In a paper defining the field and principles of anthropology, Boas simultaneously embraced both methods.

In this sense, anthropology is the science that endeavors to reconstruct the early history of mankind, and that tries, whenever possible to express in the form of laws ever-recurring modes of historical happenings.⁵

The natural science method was once the anthropological method. In the early days, when anthropologists wrote under the dominance of the evolutionary viewpoint, before Boas had appeared to reduce their hypothetical schemes to unsound conjectures, anthropologists employed the comparative method, and were thereby natural historians or natural scientists. Tylor, for example, declared that to many educated minds (but not to Tylor):

there seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature, that our thoughts, wills and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals.⁶

Although Tylor did not entirely overlook the fact that the culture of any group has been largely determined by the experiences of that group, his interest lay in reducing human behavior to types.

In studying both the recurrence of special habits or ideas in several districts and their prevalence within each district, there come before us ever-reiterated proofs of regular causation, producing the phenomena of human life, and of laws of maintenance and diffusion according to which these phenomena settle into permanent standard conditions of society at definite stages of culture.⁷

Tylor and his contemporaries, sought to reduce cultural data to classes, and to tell the history of the development of such classes. So, for example, as has been pointed out by Park and Burgess, Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage is, more exactly, a natural history of human marriage. Westermarck calls his method “comparative sociology”:

Its ultimate object is, of course, the same as that of every other science, namely, to explain the facts with which it is concerned, to give an answer to the question, why?⁸

This interest in a search for fundamental social laws was halted when the assumptions of the evolutionistic anthropologists were pointed out and their central fallacy made clear. As early as 1896 Fran Boas⁹ showed that this fallacy lay in the false assumption that the same phenomena are always due to the same causes, and in the conclusion therefrom that there is one uniform pattern of cultural evolution applicable to all groups. In a paper in which he made this criticism of the comparative method, as then practiced, Boas announced the program for future anthropological investigation—a program which was to be faithfully followed by American anthropologists for a generation.¹⁰

The immediate results of the historical method are, therefore, histories of the cultures of diverse tribes which have been the subject of study. I fully agree with those anthropologists who claim that this is not the ultimate aim of our science, because the general laws, although implied in such description, cannot be clearly formulated nor their relative value appreciated with a thorough comparison of the manner in which they assert themselves in different cultures. But I insist that the application of this method is the indispensable condition of sound progress. The psychological problem is contained in the results of the historical inquiry. When we have cleared up the history of a single culture and understand the effects of environment and the psychological conditions that are reflected in it we have made a step forward, as we can then investigate in how far the same causes or other causes were at work in the development of other cultures. Thus by comparing histories of growth general laws may be found. This method is much safer than the comparative method, as it is usually practiced, because instead of a hypothesis on the mode of development actual history forms the basis of our deductions.

Similar reactions to evolutionistic anthropology took place in England and in Germany, and anthropology became a historical science. During the first quarter of this century anthropologists have been engaged largely in determining the distribution of specific traits of specific peoples, and in offering hypotheses as to the histories of specific groups without written records. They have been dealing with events. In Kroeber’s Anthropology he states that “anthropology has been occupied with trying to generalize the findings of history,”¹¹ but in fact the pages which follow this statement generalize very little upon history; they are history. The historical method employed by recent American anthropologists has been clearly formulated by Kroeber:

It is historical in the sense that it insists on first depicting things as they are and then inferring generalization secondarily if at all, instead of plunging at once into a search for principles. It may not seem historical in the literal conventional sense because the ethnologist’s data are not presented to him chronologically. He is therefore compelled to establish his time sequences. This he does by comparisons, especially by taking the fullest possible cognizance of all space factors—geography, diffusions, distributions. As soon, however, as he has reconstructed his time sequences as well as he may, he follows the methods of the orthodox historian. He describes, giving his product depth through consideration of environmental and especially of psychological factors; but he describes only. It is each unique event that holds his interest, not the common likeness that may seem to run through events but which he finds, as he remains objective, to dilute thinner in proportion as he scrutinizes more accurately and finally to melt into intangibilities….

In essence, then, modern ethnology says that so and so happened, and may tell why it happened thus in that particular case. It does tell, and it does not try to tell why things happen in society as such.¹²

At the same time Kroeber kept in mind a more remote end of cultural anthropology in natural science:

As long as we continue offering the world only reconstruction of specific detail, and consistently show a negativistic attitude toward broader conclusions, the world will find very little of profit in ethnology. People do want to know why.¹³

In general, recent American anthropologists have been practical field workers who have had little occasion to stop and reflect upon their methods and distinguish the historical interest from that of natural science. Of those who have appreciated that there is here a fundamental difference in the logical character of facts, Kroeber has made the clearest statements. He did not, however, make the sharp distinction immediately. His “Eighteen Professions,” published in 1915, is an affirmation by an anthropologist that his method is historical. Kroeber felt the fundamental difference between the method of history and the method of natural science, but in this paper he assumed that cultural phenomena were incapable of treatment by a natural science. He called all natural science “biology.”

“Anthropology today includes two studies which fundamental differences of aim and method render irreconcilable. One of these branches is biological and psychological; the other, social or historical…. In what follows, historical anthropology, history and sociology are referred to as history. Physical anthropology and psychology are included in biology.” He concludes: “In fine, the determinations and methods of biological, psychological or natural science do not exist for history, are disregarded by consistent biological practice. Most biologists have implicitly followed their aspect of this doctrine, but their subsequent success has tempted many historians, especially sociologists, anthropologists and theorists, to imitate them instead of pursuing their proper complementary method.¹⁴

But in a later paper,¹⁵ Kroeber made a clear distinction between the historical-geographical and the natural science methods. “Data may be viewed directly as they present themselves or we can seek to pass through them to the processes involved.” In the realm of the “superorganic,” “culture history” is a “depiction of phenomena,” while “social psychology” is “formulation of processes.” In this paper Kroeber acknowledges the possibility of a natural science of the superorganic, and sociology is no longer included with history: “There is no a priori reason visible, accordingly, why a science of cultural mechanics or social psychology, or sociology, is impossible” (p. 640). Such a sociology must, he says, consistently view “social phenomena and forces as cultural, and not as aggregations and products of psychic phenomena and forces” (p. 650).

Now the interesting fact is that though modern anthropology is primarily history, it does tend in various regions of inquiry to become this “social psychology” or “sociology” of which Kroeber speaks. It does occasionally “pass through data to the processes involved.” Physical anthropology, of course, has long since advanced beyond a mere taxonomic classification of biological types of the human species, and frequently directs its attention to the processes whereby somatological change takes place. Primitive linguistics early sought out types and processes. Archaeology remains closest to history.¹⁶ It is the ethnologist who deals with the phenomena of the superorganic.¹⁷ At first the method of the ethnologist was simply depictive. Ethnology came to be distinguished from ethnography, the latter term meaning descriptive (depictive) ethnology, only when ethnology came to be something besides mere description. Ethnologists do reduce their data to types, and they do arrive at formulations of processes.

An example of how descriptions of processes are almost inevitable in considering ethnological problems could be found in almost all modern ethnological writing, but we may take as an example a paper by Edward Sapir entitled “Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method.”¹⁸ In it, Dr. Sapir is unequivocal in his view that modern anthropology is a purely historical science:

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself a strictly historical science. Its data can not be understood, either in themselves or in relation to one another, except as the endpoints of specific sequences of events reaching back into the remote past. Some of us may be more interested in the psychological laws of human development that we believe ourselves capable of extracting from the raw materials of ethnology and archaeology, than in the establishment of definitive historical facts and relationships that would tend to make this material intelligible, but it is not at all clear that the formulations of such laws is any more the business of the anthropologist than of the historian in the customarily narrow sense of the word…. Granting that the labours of the folk-psychologists are justifiable in themselves, the main point remains that so-called primitive culture consists throughout the phenomena that, so far as the ethnologist is concerned, must be worked out historically, that is, in terms of actual happenings, however inferred, that are conceived to have a specific sequence, a specific localization, and specific relations among themselves.

Sapir presents an exhaustive outline of means whereby the relative priority of cultural elements in defined cultures may be determined. Such, for example, are “principles of necessary presupposition,” “relative firmness of association,” cultural elaboration and specialization,” etc. But this leads him to express in general formulae the recurrence of phenomena which may be relied on to establish such a chronology, and the refinement of such formulae leads to the statement of natural “laws.” Thus, in inquiring into the limitations upon the information to be obtained from the interpretation of the geographic distribution of culture traits, he is led to make this statement:

A culture element is transmitted with maximum ease when it is conceptually readily detachable from its cultural setting, is not hedged about in practice by religious or other restraints, is without difficulty assimilable to the borrowing culture, and travels from one tribe to another living in friendly, or at least intimate, relations with it, particularly when these tribes are bound to each other by ties of intermarriage and linguistic affinity and are situated on an important trade route.

Here the ethnologist has stated a “natural law,” the description of process...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I MODERNIZATION
• PART II PEASANTS
• PART III COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CIVILIZATIONS
• Selected Bibliography
• Index