Civilizations as Cultural Structures?

Redfield’s interest in civilization studies culminated in the establishment by him and Milton Singer of the Comparative Civilizations program at the University of Chicago. Generously funded by the Ford Foundation, Redfield and Singer launched this program in 1951 to foster interdisciplinary comparative civilization studies. Through this program, they brought together a distinguished collection of graduate students and post-doctoral scholars who carried out over the course of the 1950s in-depth studies of the world’s major civilizations. Redfield’s health began to fail in the mid-1950s, however, and by 1958 he died of lymphoma. Despite illness during his last few years, he devoted himself to writing a final book on the aims and methods of civilization studies. Although he did not complete this book, he did finish three manuscript chapters, which his wife published following his death in the volumes of his collected papers that she edited. In the first of these chapters, “Civilizations as Things Thought About,” Redfield examined the challenges associated with defining civilizations and argued that civilizations represented a construct that referred to a specific form of culture or society. In essence, he argued, civilizations were not fundamentally different from primitive societies, as many had proposed, but differed largely by degree of complexity. In the second chapter, “Civilizations as Societal Structures? The Development of Community Studies,” he built upon ideas he had presented earlier in his 1956 book Peasant Society and Culture, focusing particularly on the transformation of anthropological community studies from examinations of isolated villages conceived in functional terms to highly contextualized studies that took account both of the network of connections that existed between village and metropolis as well as historical factors shaping the village. ¹ Finally, in the third chapter, “Civilizations as Cultural Structures, which is reprinted here, Redfield amplified ideas he had first presented in his article “The Primitive World View” (1952) and later book The Primitive World and Its Transformations (1953) regarding how explorations of great and little traditions and worldview analyses could be used as a basis for comparative civilization studies. Unfortunately, Redfield died before he could finish his book on civilization studies, but his ideas, especially his Great and Little Traditions construct, found wide application among students of comparative civilizations from the late 1950s through early 1970s.