Relying upon close readings of virtually all of his published and unpublished writings as well as extensive interviews with former colleagues and students, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology traces the development of Robert Redfield's ideas regarding social change and the role of social science in American society. Clifford Wilcox's exploration of Redfield's pioneering efforts to develop an empirically based model of the transformation of village societies into towns and cities is intended to recapture the questions that drove early development of modernization...

Relying upon close readings of virtually all of his published and unpublished writings as well as extensive interviews with former colleagues and students, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology traces the development of Robert Redfield's ideas regarding social change and the role of social science in American society. Clifford Wilcox's exploration of Redfield's pioneering efforts to develop an empirically based model of the transformation of village societies into towns and cities is intended to recapture the questions that drove early development of modernization...

Robert Redfield is remembered today primarily as an anthropologist, but during his lifetime Redfield's cross-disciplinary activity reflected a strong interest in infusing anthropological practice with sociological theory. Like a handful of other anthropologists, including A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski, who shared his interests during the 1920s through 1930s, his works came to define a new subfield known as social anthropology.

Redfield was distinct in being one of the first Americans to devote himself seriously to social anthropology, a field dominated initially by...