3. American Anthropologists Discover Peasants

Abstract

3. American Anthropologists Discover Peasants Stephen O. Murray The peasant is an immemorial figure on the world social landscape, but anthropology noticed him only recently. Clifford Geertz, "Studies of Peasant Life" After the First World War, American anthropologists' focus on the distribution of aboriginal cultural traits faded, and they gradually withdrew from salvaging memories of prereservation life from aging Native Americans (see Darnell 1977, 2001; Cole 2003). Anthropologists, particularly in the Midwest, began to pay attention to functioning contemporary cultures, albeit often continuing to look at atomistic traits ("survivals" of aboriginal culture) within a framework of "acculturation" (Redfield, Linton, and Herskovits 1936) and along geographic distributions that were taken as indicators of historical changes (while mostly continuing Franz Boas's a priori rejection of anything that had been written about a culture by anyone other than a professionally trained anthropologist).1 The research by some University of Chicago anthropology graduate students who were fledged before an anthropology department split off from the preeminent sociology department was rooted in the "Chicago school of sociology" focus on urban "disorganization" (anomie, vice, crime) of immigrants to Chicago from rural backgrounds and the uneven assimilation of émigrés from peasant societies outside the United States. The exemplar of research on immigrant peasants in their society of origin and struggling in the United States was The Polish Peasant in America and Europe(Thomas and Znaniecki 1927). Thomas was forced out of the University of Chicago, and his own more general book Old World Traits Transplanted appeared bylined Robert E. Park and Herbert A. Miller in 1921.2 Park, whose 1904 PhD was from the University of Heidelberg, played an important role in introducing German sociological ideas to America, including the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft (community/society) ideal types of Ferdinand Tönnies, which were the prototype for the romantic [End Page 61] notions of homogeneous, harmonious peasant communities articulated by Park's son-in-law, Robert Redfield, communities contrasting to the conflict-plagued, vice-ridden cities filled with "marginal" immigrants (see Park 1924, 1928; Wirth 1938; Bulmer 1984).3 Such a Jeffersonian view of noble (genuine) yeoman (and suspect "city slickers" with a spurious culture) was not part of the peasant studies by those who had been trained at the University of California, Berkeley (where there was no sociology department) by Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie. Redfield's representation of Tepoztlán was vigorously challenged in a restudy of the community by a Columbia-trained anthropologist, Oscar Lewis (1944, 1947, 1951, 1953). The controversy was explained away at the time by some (including Redfield 1955a:136) as reflecting differences in temperament between the observers (Redfield looking for harmony and looking at what people enjoyed in contrast to Lewis looking for and at their troubles).4 By the time Redfield's glorification of "little communities" came under critical fire from other anthropologists, a peasant-based revolution in China had interfered with Redfield's own research agenda, and anthropologists had forgotten the roots of Chicago anthropology study of peasant communities in the immigrant assimilation "Chicago school" work, even though the German sociology–Robert Park–Robert Redfield lineage was remembered as the root of Redfield's folk/urban and little community/ urban civilization typologies. Although Kroeber and Lowie were, in some senses, heirs of German romanticism of the Volk (not least as former students of Franz Boas), neither German sociology nor the Jeffersonian mythos of the yeomanry seemed to affect the work of Berkeley anthropology alumni. The German romantic traditions also had less discernible influence on Redfield's students than on Redfield. Indeed, "Redfield's students" presented themselves more as students of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and participated in the cross-disciplinary paradigm of functionalism that was mixed with European social theory in the Harvard and Columbia sociology paradigm that eclipsed the "Chicago school" within sociology after World War II. The Berkeley alumni had not worked directly with Radcliffe-Brown and, insofar as their work was functionalist, seemed more interested in the cultural dynamics of Bronislaw Malinowski than in the equilibrium-assuming Radcliffe-Brown functionalism. At least one of the Berkeley alumni, Walter Goldschmidt—like Oscar Lewis, John W. Bennett, and Herbert Passin—did research on agriculturists in the United...