ABSTRACT
In the introduction to his dissertation, Redfield advanced the most sharply articulated version of his vision for a revised approach to anthropology. He positioned his work clearly against that of Franz Boas, the father of American professional anthropology. While Boas deserved all due respect for establishing the field as an academic discipline and raising up a full generation of graduate students and practitioners, Redfield argued, Boas had also exercised a stultifying effect on the discipline. In his efforts to oppose the social evolutionary notions so prevalent in 19th-century anthropology because of their racist underpinnings, Boas had gone too far, Redfield charged, and had quashed the theoretical and developmental impulse within the discipline. Anthropologists could engage in social evolutionary conceptions, Redfield proposed, provided they took care to avoid the contamination of racist assumptions. Redfield advanced his own study as an example of an inquiry that sought to go beyond the mere antiquarianism that Boasian historical studies had become by the 1920s, and rise instead to the level of social anthropology, an empirical discipline informed by generalizing theoretical assumptions.
