'Robert Redfield and Modernization vision'(Sackley, 2012)

SACKLEY, Nicole, 2012, "COSMOPOLITAN AND THE USES OF TRADITION: Robert Redford and Alternative Vision of Modernization during Cold War", MODERN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, 9-3: 565~595, Cambridge University Press, (doi:10.1017/S1479244312000200).

569~570

Where modernization theorist tended to view tradition as a precursor and obstacle to modernity (societies overthrew one for the other), Redfield and his colleagues conceptualized tradition as a dynamic and invented construct in its own right, one with the cultural power to smooth and speed the project of becoming modern.

현대화 이론가들이 전통을 현대화의 전조나 장애물(근대화를 위해 사라져야 한다고)로 보는 경향 속에서, 레드필드와 동료들은 전통을 역동적이고 그 자체로 발명된 구성체(invented construct)로 개념화했으며, 이 구성체로서 전통은 현대로 나아가는 프로젝트를 순조롭게 진행하고 속도를 낼 수 있는 문화적 힘을 가지고 있었다. 

 

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By the late 1950s, Redfield’s work had made its imprint on scholars like Geertz, Edward Shils, David Apter, and Robert Bellah, whose concerns revolved more directly around economic and political development in the “new states” of Asia and Africa. Through fieldwork and theorizing, these scholars questioned the image of a generic traditional society where cultural values had to be overcome. As they struggled to build a more complex theory of social change, some, like Geertz and Bellah, came to abandon the project altogether.

1950년대 후반까지 레드필드의 연구는 클리포드 기어츠, 에드워드 쉴즈, 데이비즏 앱터, 로버트 벨라 같은 학자들에게 각인되었고, 이들의 관심사는 아시아와 아프리카의 '새로운 국가'에서의 경제적 정치적 발전에 더 직접적으로 집중되었다. 이러한 학자들은 현장연구와 이론을 통해 문화적 가치를 극복해야 한다는 전통 사회에 관한 일반적 접근에 의문을 제기하였다. 사회변화에 대한 더 복잡한 이론을 세우기 위해 고군분투하다, 기어츠나 벨라 같은 몇몇은 프로젝트를 포기하기도 했다. 

Redfield would not live to see the unraveling of the postwar discourse about modernization: he died of leukemia in 1958. But in one of his last essays, he began to question whether his theories of tradition and modernity offered a relevant lens on a contemporary globe “increasingly characterized by a worldwide way of life that tends to obliterate what is local and traditional.” Redfield labeled the phenomena “modernization” and “post-civilization.” 11 Later generations of theorists often termed it “globalization.” It was not a future he anticipated with any pleasure.

레드필드는 전후 현대화에 대한 담론이 어떻게 풀려가는지 보지 못한 채 1958년 백혈병으로 죽었다. 그의 마지막 에세이 중 하나에서, 그는 전통과 현대에 대한 그의 이론이 "지역적이고 전통적인 것을 말살하는 전지구적인(worldwide)  삶의 방식이 점점 더 짙어지는" 현대 지구에 적절한 시각을 제공했는지 질문을 제기했다. 레드필드는 그러한 현상을 '현대화(modernazation)'과 '탈-문명화(post-civilazation)'라 불렀다(REDFIELD, 1962: 414). 후대 이론가들은 이를 '전지구화(globalization)이라 불렀다. 이는 레드필드가 기대했던 미래가 아니었다.

 

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Redfield’s career as a theorist of modernization can be characterized broadly into three phases: the folk–urban phase, the comparative-civilizations phase, and the India phase. From the late 1920s through the early 1940s, Redfield’s search for scientific generalizations about contemporary social change reinvigorated the tradition–modernity polarity in American social science. From World War II through the mid-1950s, Redfield moved away from studies of universal processes toward a historical engagement with particular civilizations in search of commonalities through comparison. Finally, at the end of his career and life, Redfield and his collaborators sought to use India, the locus classicus of thinking about tradition and modernity, as a field through which to understand the place of tradition in the modern world.

현대화에 대한 이론가서로 레드필드는 크게 세 단계로 나눠서 볼 수 있다. 민속-도시 단계, 비교-문명 단계, 인도 단계로. 1920년대 후반부터 1940년대 초반까지, 당대의 사회변화에 대한 과학적 일반화를 시도했던 레드필드의 연구는 미국 사회과학에서 전통-현대 논의에 다시 활력을 불어넣었다. 2차세계대전부터 1950년대 중반까지, 레드필드는 보편적 과정에 대한 연구로부터 비교를 통해 공통점을 찾기 위해 특정 문명으로의 역사적 참여로 초점을 옮겨갔다. 그의 경력과 삶의 마지막에 레드필드는 그의 동료들과 함께 전통과 현대에 대해 고찰해보고자 인도를 현대 세계 속 전통의 장소로 다루고자 하였다. 

 

 

현대성의 조건에 불안하게 바라보았다. 거대한 산업도시인 시카고를 보면서 그의 과학과 문명에 대한 생각이 시작되었다. ... 새롭게 생겨난 시카고 학파는 그에게 결정적인 영향을 주었다. ... 그들은 학생들에게 이 거대도시를 '문명의 과정'을 이해하는 '사회적 실험실'로 보기를 권장했다. 

 

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Chicago school pioneer W. I. Thomas explained social change by figuring the city as the cauldron of modernity and the peasant as the traditional subject transformed through a process of social disorganization and adaption. 14 Park brought to the Chicago school a belief, drawn from social theorists Emile Durkheim, Henry Sumner Maine, and Georg Simmel, that the critical transformation in human society involved a shift from small intimate communities to larger cosmopolitan societies joined by bonds of interest and contract. A disciple of Dewey and William James, Park also hypothesized that social change occurred when men on the margins of society injected new subjectivities, ideas, and values into a dominant culture. Park and Redfield spoke constantly in the 1920s, and Park imparted to his son-in-law his evolutionary dualism, ambivalence about progress and its metropolitan terminus, and habit of international travel. He encouraged Redfield to apply sociological concepts to the case of modernizing people in rural Mexico, the place Redfield had selected for his own fieldwork.

 

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Over the next twenty years, Redfield worked to craft a nomothetic science of social change, beginning with his study of the village of Tepoztl ́ an, in the shadow of Mexico City. Redfield’s central interest was in how, and to what extent, “civilization” had penetrated village life. He concluded that, facilitated by an advance guard of villagers who adopted urban technologies and beliefs, “folkways” were steadily crumpling under the onslaught of modernity. Tepoztl ́ an was a community in transition, caught between the traditional and the modern. Published as Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village, Redfield’s study bore the clear imprint of Park’s theories about marginal men and social disorganization as well as Redfield’s own extensive readings in the folkways concept of Henry Sumner Maine and the Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft typologies of Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. In each of these typologies, the rise of industrial civilization constituted a tragic loss of communal solidarity. Later modernization theorists would recast these typologies into rosier picture of progress, but Redfield maintained throughout his life a sense of pathos about the costs of modern life.

Tepoztlan favored ethnographic detail over social-scientific abstractions. In 1930, Redfield embarked on a decade-long, multisite study of the Yucatan peninsula in pursuit of firmer generalizations about the nature of social change and civilization and the value of heuristic types. He helped develop the concept of “acculturation,” postulating that social change occurred through sustained “culture contact,” syncretism, and cultural fusion. 16 Increasingly, Redfield came to perceive this culture mixing to be as much a psychological and ideational process as it was a technical one. Where Redfield’s first Yucatan report defined “civilization” as “schools, roads, and economic exploitation,” by the late 1930sh e was characterizing “folk culture” and “urban civilization” as contrasting sets of worldviews that organized the psychological life of communities. In the Yucatan, Redfield selected four communities for study—a tribal area, a village, a town, and a city—and arranged them along a “folk–urban continuum” anchored by polar ideal types. The “folk society” was defined by its isolation, cultural homogeneity, personal and familial ties, and sacred beliefs; the city by its economic and political ties to a wider world, cultural heterogeneity, impersonal relations, and individualistic and secular orientation. Measured against these ideal types, the close and comparative study of real-life communities was meant to sharpen hypotheses about social change.

Tepoztlan favored ethnographic detail over social-scientific abstractions. In 1930, Redfield embarked on a decade-long, multisite study of the Yucatan peninsula in pursuit of firmer generalizations about the nature of social change and civilization and the value of heuristic types. He helped develop the concept of “acculturation,” postulating that social change occurred through sustained “culture contact,” syncretism, and cultural fusion. 16 Increasingly, Redfield came to perceive this culture mixing to be as much a psychological and ideational process as it was a technical one. Where Redfield’s first Yucatan report defined “civilization” as “schools, roads, and economic exploitation,” by the late 1930sh e was characterizing “folk culture” and “urban civilization” as contrasting sets of worldviews that organized the psychological life of communities. In the Yucatan, Redfield selected four communities for study—a tribal area, a village, a town, and a city—and arranged them along a “folk–urban continuum” anchored by polar ideal types. The “folk society” was defined by its isolation, cultural homogeneity, personal and familial ties, and sacred beliefs; the city by its economic and political ties to a wider world, cultural heterogeneity, impersonal relations, and individualistic and secular orientation. Measured against these ideal types, the close and comparative study of real-life communities was meant to sharpen hypotheses about social change. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz critiqued Redfield’s largely ideational model of culture for ignoring the central place that plantation agriculture, tied to an international economic system, had in shaping life along the Yucatan peninsula. Most famously, Oscar Lewis restudied Tepoztl ́ an in the late 1940s and found not Redfield’s organic community but a village riven by factions and struggling with material privation and disease. 19 Redfield acknowledged these critiques, but none of them caused him to fundamentally rethink his scholarly project.

 

19)
Sol Tax, “Culture and Civilization in Guatemalan Societies,” Scientific Monthly 48 (1939), 463–7; 
Sidney W. Mintz, “The Folk–Urban Continuum and the Rural Proletarian Community,” American Journal of Sociology 59 (1953), 136–43; 
Oscar Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztl ́ an Restudied (Urbana, IL, 1951).

 

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By the 1950s, he had merged his intellectual and political commitments into an alternative theory of social change. Where he once saw civilization as a single, linear end point of modernization, he now looked to the great “living civilizations” of the world—defined by him as China, Japan, India, Islam, and the West—as separate sources for a shared humanistic tradition. Each of these civilizations contained elements of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.E a c h had developed a “great tradition” of art, philosophy, and moral inquiry out of continuous interplay with the “little traditions” of their folk societies. The ultimate measure of any society’s modernity, Redfield now believed, was not economic development, technology, or particular legal or political structures. It was instead the ability of its people to fashion moral values by integrating their own great traditions and new ideas. And world peace depended on the process.