ABSTRACT
Prior to the 1930s the highlands of Guatemala were largely undescribed, except in travelogues. Just two decades later it had become one of the most anthropologically well-investigated areas of the world, largely due to the research that Robert Redfield and Sol Tax carried out between 1934 and 1941. Separately and together, Redfield and Tax developed lines of research that anticipated and guided anthropological investigations of people living in peasant and urban communities. I n their pathbreaking work on the "urban / rura l continuum," ethnic relations, the regional analysis of indigenous economic systems, world view, and social change, Redfield and Tax supplied many of the empirical themes and theoretical directions that ethnographers subsequently explored. Thei r work helped to define the major outlines of research in the region into the 1970s, and since then much wr i t ing about the region has been formulated in crit ical response to the Redfield-Tax program.
