The Cultural Role of Cities

In the early 1950s, the University of Chicago emerged as one of the leading centers of modernization studies. One of the key leaders at Chicago was economic historian Bert Hoselitz, who published an influential journal, Economic Development and Cultural Change. Hoselitz periodically held conferences to bring together government policy-makers and social scientists to discuss various aspects of development. In 1953, he organized a conference to explore the role of cities in economic development and cultural change. He proposed that the conference evaluate this influence from five different perspectives—cultural, demographic, economic, historical, and sociological—and he solicited leadoff papers from prominent scholars for each session. Hoselitz had collaborated closely with Redfield and Milton Singer in a variety of interdisciplinary ventures at the University of Chicago during the late 1940s to early 1950s, and he requested them to write the paper on the cultural influence of cities on development. Redfield and Singer wrote “The Cultural Role of Cities” in response to Hoselitz’s request and published it subsequently in Economic Development and Cultural Change. In this article, Redfield and Singer advanced a unique taxonomy of cities as loci of change and influence and elaborated, in particular, upon the interplay of great and little traditions within cities. This article came to exercise an important influence among development theorists and, especially, among anthropologists interested in the new frontier of urban anthropology.