Robert Redfield

Career

In 1923 he and his wife Margaret Park Redfield traveled to Mexico, where he met Manuel Gamio, a Mexican anthropologist who had studied with Franz Boas. Redfield graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Communication Studies, eventually with a J.D. from its law school and then a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, which he began to teach in 1927.

He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1947 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950. After a series of published field studies from Mexican communities (Tepoztlán in Morelos and Chan Kom in Yucatán), in 1953 he published The Primitive World and its Transformation and in 1956, Peasant Society and Culture. Moving further into a broader synthesis of disciplines, Redfield embraced a forum for interdisciplinary thought that included archeology, anthropological linguistics, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and ethnology.

Redfield wrote in 1955 about his own experience doing research in Latin America on peasants. As he did research, he realized he had been trained to treat the society as an isolated culture. However, he found people were involved with trade and there were connections between villages and states. More than that, the village culture was not bounded. Beliefs and practices were not isolated. Redfield decided it did not make sense to study people as isolated units, but rather it would be better to understand people in a broader perspective. Traditionally, anthropologists studied folkways in the "little tradition", taking into account broader civilization, the "great tradition". He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950.

One of Redfield's students at the University of Chicago was well-known novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut was influenced by Redfield's work on the "folk society" and references him in his novel Slapstick, as well as throughout his non-fiction speeches and commencement addresses. Vonnegut recalls:

when I went to the University of Chicago, and I heard the head of the Department of Anthropology, Robert Redfield, lecture on the folk society, which was essentially a stable, isolated extended family, he did not have to tell me how nice that could be.

Vonnegut would later remark that "Dr. Redfield's theory of the Folk Society ... has been the starting point for my politics, such as they are."

University of Chicago Anthropology

Redfield intermittently served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology along with Sol Tax after the retirement of Fay-Cooper Cole in the late 1940s. Cole had built up the Archaeology Laboratory Skeletal Collection, which began during the earliest iterations of the department in the late 1890s through the 1940s. The collection of human remains of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, bone fragments, and artifacts were compiled, studied, stored, and possibly exhibited on the campus. The skeletal collection contained human remains and archaeological objects taken and collected by faculty, students, curators, and donors through excavations of Illinois burial mounds such as the Fisher Mounds, Starved Rock, Kincaid, Algeria, Globe, Arizona, among materials from private donors. The collection also contained human remains from the University's Anatomy Department and Medical School. Donations accounted for a significant portion of the collection. Skeletal remains of 400 Indigenous people, as well as 10,000 bone fragments, stone, pottery and shell implements and artifacts largely excavated from Fisher and Adler Mounds, were donated in 1930 by George Langford, an engineer from Joliet who as also an amateur anthropologist, an honorary Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and later Curator of Plant Fossils at Field Museum.

The politics of the department had changed with the faculty body, and Redfield and Tax determined that the Skeletal Collection no longer served the research purposes of the department, and the storage space could be better used. They tasked a graduate student in the department to inventory and report on the collection. Around 1950, much of the skeletal collection was unofficially dispersed to other institutions like Indiana University, Illinois State Museum, Beloit College, and the Field Museum. Under NAGPRA guidelines, these institutions are now responsible for deaccessioning and repatriating Native American human remains and funerary objects. The remaining skeletal materials do not account for extent of the historical collection; the department's report recommended that the majority be "dumped."

The contemporary University of Chicago Archaeology Laboratory continues to hold non-Native American human remains, the paleoanthropology laboratory contains a large osteology collection.