ABSTRACT
At the close of Tepoztlán, Redfield acknowledged that his study was only a beginning and that it had not actually delivered on his boldest expectation of elucidating the principles of social change through study of change “as it happens.” A fundamental limitation of his study had been its lack of a comparative dimension. He had successfully observed and mapped changes within Tepoztecan society but without one or more external entities to compare these changes against, his observations did not easily lend themselves to generalizations. Following his study of Tepoztlán, Redfield conceived of a broader investigation grounded on a comparative basis. The Carnegie Institution of Washington had sponsored a broad-ranging set of historical and archeological investigations in the nearby Yucatan peninsula, and Redfield successfully obtained support from this organization to pursue complementary anthropological studies on the peninsula. Redfield conceived of a series of community studies focusing on four towns and villages of varying degrees of size, complexity, and sophistication that he could use to study the fundamental processes of social change and transformation. The Carnegie Institution of Washington provided Redfield funding for this investigation for the full decade of the 1930s. This summary of his design, published as his first annual status report, provides a clear description of his initial goals and efforts at defining a comparative methodology for anthropological study.
