Download or read book Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology written by Clifford Wilcox and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relying upon close readings of virtually all of his published and unpublished writings as well as extensive interviews with former colleagues and students, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology traces the development of Robert Redfield's ideas regarding social change and the role of social science in American society. Clifford Wilcox's exploration of Redfield's pioneering efforts to develop an empirically based model of the transformation of village societies into towns and cities is intended to recapture the questions that drove early development of modernization theory. Reconsideration of these debates will enrich contemporary thinking regarding the history of American anthropology and international development

Download or read book Social Anthropology written by Clifford Wilcox and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book The Papers of Robert Redfield written by Robert Redfield and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Ethnographic Moment written by Robert Redfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first fifty years of the twentieth century were a time of ferment in American anthropology. American ethnographic work evolved from the "salvage" work of professionals affiliated with museums who undertook to document with artifacts and testimony the threatened traditional way of life among the Native American tribes, to the establishment of anthropology as a science, represented in university departments, that sought to describe the "ethnographic present" of isolated primitive peoples, often in distant parts of the world. By the beginning of the 1950s, cultural anthropology discovered the peasant. Robert Redfield, himself a leading figure in this paradigm shift, challenged anthropology's focus on a static model of the isolated primitive community, pointing out the dynamic nature of the "little communities" he studied in Mesoamerica. These were not isolated communities, but rather local, traditional cultures located well within the sphere of a complex urban culture. In order to distinguish the "great tradition" deriving from urban centers from the "little tradition" of a more primitive culture, Redfield believed anthropology needed to refer to other disciplines, such as theology, philosophy, economics, and sociology. In other words, anthropology had to develop from the collection of material artifacts to a concern with the immaterial realm of values and ideas. This collection of essays and previously unpublished papers, The Ethnographic Moment, tells the story of a remarkable chapter in Redfield's pioneering efforts on what was then an anthropological frontier. The present volume covers the years from 1952 to 1958, the last of Redfield's life. It focuses solely on his study of peasant communities. At the core of the book is his correspondence with the philosopher-humanist F. G. Friedmann, who played an important role in Redfield's conceptualization of the complex urban-rural continuum that characterizes the peasant's world. The volume also includes an autobiographical introduction by Friedmann that illuminates both his own writings and the humanistic background that motivated his study of peasantry.

Download or read book American Anthropology and Company written by Stephen O. Murray and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In American Anthropology and Company, linguist and sociologist Stephen O. Murray explores the connections between anthropology, linguistics, sociology, psychology, and history, in broad-ranging essays on the history of anthropology and allied disciplines. On subjects ranging from Native American linguistics to the pitfalls of American, Latin American, and East Asian fieldwork, among other topics, American Anthropology and Company presents the views of a historian of anthropology interested in the theoretical and institutional connections between disciplines that have always been in conversation with anthropology. Recurring characters include Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Redfield, W. I. and Dorothy Thomas, and William Ogburn. While histories of anthropology rarely cross disciplinary boundaries, Murray moves in essay after essay toward an examination of the institutions, theories, and social networks of scholars as never before, maintaining a healthy skepticism toward anthropologists' views of their own methods and theories.

Download or read book The Papers of Robert Redfield written by Robert Redfield and published by [Chicago] : University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1962 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Primitive World and Its Transformations written by Robert Redfield and published by . This book was released on 1957 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Touches on Arunta and Pitjandadjara world view and ethics.

Download or read book A Social History of Anthropology in the United States written by Thomas C. Patterson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In part due to the recent Yanomami controversy, which has rocked anthropology to its very core, there is renewed interest in the discipline's history and intellectual roots, especially amongst anthropologists themselves. The cutting edge of anthropological research today is a product of earlier questions and answers, previous ambitions, preoccupations and adventures, stretching back one hundred years or more. This book is the first comprehensive history of American anthropology. Crucially, Patterson relates the development of anthropology in the United States to wider historical currents in society. American anthropologists over the years have worked through shifting social and economic conditions, changes in institutional organization, developing class structures, world politics, and conflicts both at home and abroad. How has anthropology been linked to colonial, commercial and territorial expansion in the States? How have the changing forms of race, power, ethnic identity and politics shaped the questions anthropologists ask, both past and present? Anthropology as a discipline has always developed in a close relationship with other social sciences, but this relationship has rarely been scrutinized. This book details and explains the complex interplay of forces and conditions that have made anthropology in America what it is today. Furthermore, it explores how anthropologists themselves have contributed and propagated powerful images and ideas about the different cultures and societies that make up our world. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the roots and reasons behind American anthropology at the turn of the twenty-first century. Intellectual historians, social scientists, and anyone intrigued by the growth and development of institutional politics and practices should read this book.

Download or read book The Little Community and Peasant Society and Culture written by Robert Redfield and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1989-03-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines two classic works of anthropology. The Little Community draws on the author's own notable studies of the villages of Tepoztlan and Chan Kom to explore the means by which scientists try to understand human communities. It contains, wrote Margaret Mead, "the essence of Robert Redfield's multifaceted contributions to the place of community studies in social science." Peasant Society and Culture outlines a speculative foundation for the emergence of anthropology from the study of isolated primitive tribes.

Download or read book Doing Fieldwork written by Robert A. Rubinstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the 1930s the highlands of Guatemala were largely undescribed, except in travelogues. Just two decades later, the highlands had become one of the most anthropologically well-investigated areas of the world. This is largely due to the research that Robert Redfield and Sol Tax carried out between 1934 and 1941. Separately and together, Redfield and Tax anticipated and guided anthropological investigations of people living in peasant and urban communities in other areas of the world. Their work helped to define the major outlines of research in the 1970s, and since then much writing about the region has been formulated in critical response to the Redfield-Tax program. Not coincidentally, since the mid-1970s anthropology has been caught up in a wave of self-doubt about the status of fieldwork and the authority of ethnographic description. This critical stance has often cast ethnography as a creative, literary enterprise. This volume presents a timely view of the process of ethnography as carried out by two of its early practitioners. Containing a wealth of ethnographic detail, the book reveals how Redfield and Tax developed and tested ethnological hypotheses, and it allows us to follow the development of their major theoretical statements. The result is an exceptionally clear picture of the process of ethnography. Redfield and Tax emerge as rigorous and sensitive observers of social life whose observations bear importantly on contemporary understandings of the ethnology of Guatemala and the enterprise of anthropology. This book will be of interest to students of method and theory in ethnography, Latin Americanists, and other professionals interested in the history of idea.

Download or read book Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America 1886 1965 written by John S. Gilkeson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the intersection of cultural anthropology and American cultural nationalism from 1886, when Franz Boas left Germany for the United States, until 1965, when the National Endowment for the Humanities was established. Five chapters trace the development within academic anthropology of the concepts of culture, social class, national character, value, and civilization, and their dissemination to non-anthropologists. As Americans came to think of culture anthropologically, as a 'complex whole' far broader and more inclusive than Matthew Arnold's 'the best which has been thought and said', so, too, did they come to see American communities as stratified into social classes distinguished by their subcultures; to attribute the making of the American character to socialization rather than birth; to locate the distinctiveness of American culture in its unconscious canons of choice; and to view American culture and civilization in a global perspective.

Download or read book Encounters with Modernity written by Clifford Wilcox and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Folk Society written by Robert Redfield and published by Irvington Pub. This book was released on 1991-10-01 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association written by Regna Darnell and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past century the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has borne witness to profound social, cultural, and technical changes, transformations that have affected anthropologists and the people they work with across the planet. In response to such global changes, anthropology continues to evolve into an increasingly complex and sophisticated discipline with a dynamic range of flourishing subfields. This volume contains the memorable stories of the seventy-seven men and women who have led the AAA during the past century. The list of the association's presidents reads like a roster of influential scholars from various specializations within anthropology. Their histories cumulatively reflect the trends in interpretive thought and fieldwork methodology that have emerged during the past ten decades. For each president the book provides a photograph and a biography replete with personal anecdotes, career highlights, and information about his or her contributions to the development of the discipline of anthropology. Important works by each president are listed separately in the back of the volume. An introduction by Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach summarizes the first century of the AAA and contextualizes the individual stories.

Download or read book Totems and Teachers written by Sydel Silverman and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic volume, edited by Sydel Silverman, presents the insiders' reflection of distinguished contemporary anthropologists on nine prominent figures who helped shape the discipline. This is one of few books that traces the theoretical development of anthropology through the lives of the well-known figures who have influenced its historical trajectory.

Download or read book Histories of Anthropology Annual written by Regna Darnell and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2006-02-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Histories of Anthropology Annual promotes diverse perspectives on the discipline's history within a global context. Critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology will be included, along with reviews and shorter pieces.This inaugural volume offers insightful looks at the careers, lives, and influence of anthropologists and others, including Herbert Spencer, Frederick Starr, Mark Hanna Watkins, Leslie White, and Jacob Ezra Thomas. Topics in this volume include anti-imperialism; racism in Guatemala; the study of peasants; the Carnegie Institution, Mayan archaeology and espionage; Cold War anthropology; African studies; literary influences; church and religion; and tribal museums.Regna Darnell is a professor of anthropology at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of Invisible Genealogies: A History of Americanist Anthropology (Nebraska 2001) and Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist . Frederic W. Gleach is a senior lecturer and curator of anthropology at Cornell University and the author of Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Nebraska 1997). Together they co-edited Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association: Presidential Portraits (Nebraska 2002).

Download or read book The Transnational Construction of Mayanness written by Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2023-05-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Transnational Construction of Mayanness explores how US academics, travelers, officials, and capitalists contributed to the construction of the Maya as an area of academic knowledge and affected the lives of the Maya peoples who were the subject of generations of anthropological research from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Expanding discussions of the neocolonial relationship between the US and its southern neighbors and emphasizing little-studied texts virtually inaccessible to those in Mexico and Central America, this is the first and only set of comparative studies to bring in US-based documentary collections as an enriching source of evidence. Contributors tap documentary, ethnographic, and ethnoarchaeological sources from North America to expand established categories of fieldwork and archival research conducted within the national spaces of Mexico and Central America. A particularly rich and diverse set of case studies interrogate the historical processes that remove sources from their place of production in the “field” to the US, challenge the conventional wisdom regarding the geography of data sources that are available for research, and reveal a range of historical relationships that enabled US actors to shape the historical experience of Maya-speaking peoples. The Transnational Construction of Mayanness offers rich insight into transnational relations and suggests new avenues of research that incorporate an expanded corpus of materials that embody the deep-seated relationship between Maya-speaking peoples and various gringo interlocutors. The work is an important bridge between Mayanist anthropology and historiography and broader literatures in American, Atlantic, and Indigenous studies. Contributors: David Carey, M. Bianet Castellanos, Matilde Córdoba Azcárate, Lydia Crafts, John Gust, Julio Cesar Hoil Gutierréz, Jennifer Mathews, Matthew Watson