Over the course of his career, Redfield progressively refined his vocabulary for discussing intermediate peoples who lay between tribal villagers and civilized urbanites. Although starting in 1930 with Tepoztlán he had used the term “folk” to refer to such intermediate peoples, he had at times not clearly distinguished in his writings the definition of peasants from folk or tribal peoples. But in his 1939 introduction to his student Horace Miner’s St. Denis: A French Canadian Parish, Redfield articulated a definition of peasantry that sharply distinguished peasants from tribal peoples. Peasants, he argued, represented a middle position between tribal and civilized peoples and, as such, they offered a useful vantage point for study of all levels of society ranging from the most simple to complex. Redfield continued into the 1950s to elaborate his conception of peasantry and to formulate a methodology to characterize these people that borrowed from both anthropology and sociology. This essay represented a major step in his effort to define peasant studies as an independent field of inquiry within social anthropology.