Doing Fieldwork : the Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax / Robert A

Doing Field work

The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax

Robert A. Rubinstein editor

with a foreword by Lisa Redfield Peattie and a new introduction by the editor

O Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK Originally published in 1991 by Westview Press, Inc.

First published 2002 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

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Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Letters from Robert Redfield are reprinted with permission of Lisa Redfield Peattie. Letters from Sol Tax are reprinted with permission of Sol Tax. Photo- graphs 5, 6, and 7 are reprinted with permission of Sol Tax. Photographs 8 through 22 are taken from the Robert Redfield Papers and the Sol Tax Papers and are reprinted with permission of the University of Chicago Archives.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2001048079

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Redfield, Robert, 1897- [Fieldwork] Doing fieldwork : the correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax / Robert A. Rubinstein, editor; with a foreword by Lisa Redfield Peattie ; and a new introduction by the editor, p. cm. Originally published: Fieldwork. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-07354 (alk. paper) 1. Tax, Sol, 1907—Correspondence. 2. Redfield, Robert, 1897— Correspondence. 3. Ethnologists—United States—Correspondence. 4. Ethnology—Field work. 5. Ethnology—Guatemala. I. Tax, Sol, 1907- II. Rubinstein, Robert A. III. Title.

GN21.R43A4 2001 305.8'0092—dc21 2001048079

ISBN 13: 978-0-7658-0735-9 (pbk) To my father, Samuel B. Rubinstein, and in memory of my mother and my aunt, Frieda L. Rubinstein and Helen Lokshin

Contents

Introduction to the Transaction Edition, Robert A. Rubinstein xi List of Illustrations and Photographs ix Foreword, Lisa Redfield Peattie xix Preface, Robert A, Rubinstein xxv

Introduction Reflection and Reflexivity in Anthropology

Robert A. Rubinstein 1

Chapter One "I followed your advice and didn't get us killed" October 1934-May 1935 37

Chapter Two "You have beaten me ... in the argument of extensive vs. intensive studies"

November 1935-June 1936 103

Chapter Three "If you want to write a book about a place, don't stay longer than three weeks" January 1937-June 1937 143

Chapter Four "For all my failure, I am getting some good insights into how things work"

December 1937-March 1938 199

vii via Contents

Chapter Five "Do you suppose that I shall be a padrino at 4 or 5 A.M. some morning, or what?"

October 1938-April 1939 233

Chapter Six "I take it that neither of us can prove what we feel probably to have been true" October 1940-May 1941 279

Related Bibliography of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax 329 Non-English Terms Used in the Correspondence 333 About the Book and Editor 337 Index 339 Illustrations and Photographs

Illustrations

1 Guatemala (Map) 184 2 Lake Atitlan Region, Guatemala (Map) 185 3 "We have a good base here in Panajachel," Tax to Redfield, December 16, 1935 (Facsimile) 186 4 "Survey and intensive study tend to strengthen and guide one another," Redfield to Tax, February 26, 1936 (Facsimile) 188

Photographs

5 Sol Tax with a San Isidro in the corredor of the Tax house in Panajachel (1937) 190 6 Gertrude Tax in the front yard of the Tax house in Panajachel (1937) 190 7 Sol, Gertrude, and Susan Tax (1938) 191 8 Sol and Susan Tax (1939) 191 9 Robert Redfield in Guatemala (1937) 192 10 Redfield family portrait, Joanna, Robert, Margaret, Lisa, and James (1938) 192 11 James, Margaret, Joanna, and Lisa Redfield with Sol Tax (1939) 193 12 The road to Agua Escondida (1937) 193 13 The marimba band plays at the fiesta for the blessing of Casa del Sol (1938) 194 14 In the garden of Casa del Sol, Donicia, Joanna Redfield, Romelia, Margaret Redfield, and Lisa Redfield 194 15 Santiago Yach, Panajachel Indian and Sol Tax's principal informant (1937) 195 16 Negrito dancers, Panajachel (1937) 195 17 Santos in a Panajachel home (1937) 196

ix X Illustrations and Photographs

18 Family group, Santiago Atitlan 196 19 San Pedro Street, Atitlan 197 20 Market scene, Santiago Atitlan (1937) 197 21 Atitecas in market, Santiago Atitlan (1937) 198 22 San Pedro Atitlan (1937) 198 Introduction to the Transaction Edition Fieldwork and Tradition in Anthropology: Resonance and Reflexivity Robert A. Rubinstein

Fieldwork has a unique place within anthropology. Ethnographic fieldwork is the single activity in which nearly all anthropologists participate during their training and throughout their careers. Anthropologists differ in the kinds of research questions they investigate and in the theoretical understandings that motivate their work and which they use in their analyses. Despite these differences, however, anthropologists recognize ethnographic fieldwork as the keystone of their profession. It is because fieldwork provides both the data and the experience central to anthropology that it is at the discipline's core. Fieldwork is at once the culmination of graduate anthropological training, the discipline's core rite de passage, and the most constant activity of most professional anthropologists. Ethnographic fieldwork involves extended periods of research "away in the field" during which times the researcher participates in and observes the activities of the people being studied.1 In addition to participant-observation, other techniques such as structured and informal interviewing, network analysis, focus groups, and archival research are used. All of these strategies are used to gain fuller understandings of how the people of a community, organization, profession, or other group organize themselves as they interact with their environment. Fieldwork allows the development of an understanding of how people learn ways of thought, ways of behaving, and modes of interpretation characteristic of their groups. It helps us to sort out how they see what they do as meaningful and significant, how they separate right from wrong, and how they elaborate what is proper behavior and what is not. As Geertz (2000:16) puts it, the aim of fieldwork is to discover about a people, "who they think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they are doing it."

Introduction.p65 11 7/3/01, 9:48 AM Xll Introduction to the Transaction Edition

What we learn through ethnographic fieldwork thus permeates the discipline. The kinds of information obtainable through this methodology inform how anthropologists think about human social life.2 As well, the practice of ethnographic fieldwork unifies practitioners through experiences unique to the discipline. Indeed the practice of ethnographic fieldwork is so ubiquitous and defining, that it is easy to suppose that fieldwork was part of anthropology from its beginning and that it has for a long time been a stable, unchanging kind of activity. Yet, despite its prominence within anthropology, during the last three decades of the twentieth century there was arguably no aspect of the discipline that came under closer scrutiny. Disquiet about anthropological fieldwork appeared to begin in the 1960s and grew through the ensuing years. At first, anthropologists traded embellished stories about the harrowing aspects of their own first fieldwork and their lack of preparation for that work. These stories motivated two subsequent trends. One line of work expressed the methodological concern for greater clarity in the techniques of anthropological research. The second line of work pursued an epistemological concern about whether what we learned from fieldwork really told us anything meaningful about the social worlds of the people we sought to understand. In one of the earliest examples of the methodological concern, Pelto (1970) set out how data collection in fieldwork might be made more explicit. This line of writing has continued and blossomed. There are now dozens of texts that elucidate the approaches and techniques of ethnographic work. These range from specialized texts that elaborate ways of conducting ethnosemantic interviews (Spradley 1979), to those that seek to make fieldwork activities systematic (Werner and Schoeple 1987), through texts that try to set out the full range of techniques available to an ethnographer (Bernard 1988), to multi-volume collections that seek to provide a "toolkit" (Schensul and LeCompte 1999). Epistemological challenges to the very possibility of ethnographic work were also plentiful in these three decades. These works questioned the status and value of the "data" collected by ethnographers (Rabinow 1977), or contested the possibility that ethnographers might produce understanding of the lives of others (Clifford 1997). This introspective self-doubt focused attention on the researcher's influences on the ethnographic encounter, which at times led to a skewed focus mainly on the ethnographer's own experience (Gottlieb and Graham 1993). At the same time, work in this tradition frequently eschewed the possibility that ethnography could report anything meaningful about the people studied (Clifford 1997). In many ways both the methodological and epistemological questioning spurred welcome developments in the way anthropologists thought about their enterprise, leading, for example, to more nuanced and careful analy- Introduction to the Transaction Edition xin

ses and to the development of new techniques to learn about culture. None- theless, one of the problems with the increasingly large number of these critiques of anthropological fieldwork — especially those that assumed an extreme epistemological relativism in the 1970s through the 1990s — was that they ig- nored and diminished the intellectual history of fieldwork.3 Early work, characterized by its serious and often sophisticated struggle to confront the complexities of fieldwork, was belitded, often without being directly consulted. In short, these critiques obscured and dismissed prior accomplishments. Yet, as Geertz (2000:18) observes about the general self-critical turn in anthropology, "there are better things to do with even a defective inheritance than trash it." Redfield and Tax worked within the tradition of American Pragmatism (Rubinstein 1991), a tradition which emphasizes "process, method, correc- tion, change, not definitive and permanent results" (Diesing 1991:75). Both Tax and Redfield would have welcomed the improvement of the craft and science of anthropology brought about through the criticism and revision of our practice. But, both would have insisted, I think that it is essential to engage this discussion with a sense of the historical resonance of earlier work in contemporary activity.4 The history of a concern for methods and methodology in anthropology is, of course, more various and thoughtful than the caricatures of early anthropologists suggest. Despite the broad-brush dismissal of this earlier work by writers assuming a self-consciously critical (and at times political) stance as mired in colonialism and privilege, the history of methodological discussions in anthropology has been more nuanced and reflexive than is generally cred- ited. Ethnographic fieldwork, the methods and methodology involved, have been the subjects of concern throughout the last century. To understand the prospects and challenges of fieldwork today it is important to have a good idea of the theoretical and practical circumstances that shaped its role in anthropology. This is not the place for an exhaustive review of the ways in which anthropologists expressed their concerns about fieldwork throughout the last century. The letters exchanged by Redfield and Tax are but one detailed source for exploring those concerns. Here I want only to give a general view of the landscape of anthropological concern with methods and methodology. The broad oudines of anthropological fieldwork as it was conceived of during most of the twentieth century were first set out by Malinowski in his Argo- nauts of the Western Pacific. Argonauts began with a chapter dedicated to outlin- ing Malinowski's understanding of anthropological fieldwork, which included long-term and full immersion in the community being studied, gaining facility with the native language, being open to the exploration of the full range of social life, learning how to behave properly within the community, and acquir- ing something of "the feeling" for the people being studied (Malinowski 1922:6- ll).5 xiv Introduction to the Transaction Edition

In the history of anthropology, Malinowski's contribution is often mostly identified with his theory of functionalism. Functionalism urged that the goal of anthropological research is to understand how a particular culture functions in the present, viewing its components in relation to how they function to support the society and culture of which they are a part. Equally, however, Malinowski is responsible for reorienting the methodology that anthropologists used, shifting these methods from more transient contacts to sustained participant observation within a community. This methodological aspect of his work was actually his more lasting achievement. It was a model that inspired many, even those who rejected functionalism, to go into the field for extended periods of time, and set the tone for anthropological research of the years between World Wars I and II. It was this methodological contribution, for example, that in part informed Redfield's (1930) community study of Tepotzlan. Contrary to the stories that anthropologists swap among themselves, throughout the twentieth century there was field training in anthropology, some formal and some informal. For example, the Harvard Chiapas Project directed by Evon Vogt, began in 1955. By 1995 it had trained about 150 students (Vogt 1994; Vogt 1995). The Chiapas Project brought students to the field in formal arrangements for university credit. At the University of California at Berkeley, George Foster began to take students to Mexico for training in 1958. Although not a formal field school, Foster's efforts were supported by a National Science Foundation grant (Foster 2000:199). In the early 1930s Sol Tax had gone to a field school among the Mescalero and Chiricahua Apache in New Mexico under the direction of Ruth Benedict (Tax 1988:3). He had taken students to the field in Mexico in the 1940s and in the 1950s ran an ethnographic field school from which the field of Action Anthropology emerged (Gearing, et al. 1960). In 1952, following the Second World War, the Wenner-Gren Foundation held an international symposium to take stock of the anthropological work that the foundation had helped to support during the preceding decade. This ten-year retrospective of anthropology left an impressive record in the form of a collection of articles edited by Alfred Kroeber (1953) in the book, Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory. Examining that volume from today's methodological concerns about fieldwork in anthropology reveals great self-consciousness about fieldwork. An- thropology Today contains fifty-one articles spanning the four fields of anthropology, physical, archaeological, sociocultural, and linguistic. Twenty-nine of these papers dealt with sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, and of those five (or about 17 percent) were devoted exclusively to methods and methodology, while others incorporated discussions of these areas.6 This self-critical concern with methods in anthropology continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s. During those decades a number of writ- XV Introduction to the Transaction Edition ings focusing on these topics suggest this concern. These works include monographs that focused the readers' attention on data collection during fieldwork. Among these were in 1954, Return to Laughterhy Laura Bohannan (Bowen 1954), in 1965 Understanding an African Kingdom: Bunyoro by John Beattie (1965), and Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist by Hortense Powdermaker (1966). Far from being statements of idiosyncratic concerns, these monographs are just one expression of a reflexive concern with fieldwork in anthropology. Some of these concerns were pursued through scholarly articles, like Earl Count's (1964) attempt to specify the dimension of "fact" in anthropology or T.F. Mcllwraith's (1964) discussion of the problem of recognizing alternative realities during fieldwork. Oth- ers, like Laura Bohannan's pseudonymous novelized account of fieldwork in West Africa pushed the edges of established anthropological writing. The concerns of the 1950s and 1960s connects direcdy to the fluores- cence of works in the 1970s that take fieldwork methods and ethnographic methodology as their main concern. The classic and comprehensive collection of papers edited by Raoul Naroll and Ronald Cohen (1970) in their A Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology, is notable not only for its thor- oughness but also for the amount of attention given to epistemological matters. While many of the particulars have changed and our understandings of the world have altered, there are many echoes of Naroll's and Cohen's work in Bernard's (1998) Handbook of Method in Cultural Anthropology. I do not wish to argue that all questions of method and epistemology had been engaged and that satisfactory and settled answers to these questions had been achieved during the twentieth century. Indeed, in some ways the questions that were raised and the outlines of answers that were put forth leave us with much unsettled material for discussion and debate. Those conversations will be richer and more conducive to reflexive thinking if we listen to the historical resonances from the earlier days of our discipline. Careful study of the letters that Robert Redfield and Sol Tax exchanged during their fieldwork in Guatemala will yield many such resonances. This will help us to do something more constructive with our anthropological inheritance than to dismiss it as a whole as old fashioned, befuddled, or out of touch with the important concerns that challenge us today. This greater reflexivity will help to improve the contemporary art and science of anthropology. xvi Introduction to the Transaction Edition

Notes

1. I use "ethnographic fieldwork" and "anthropological fieldwork" inter- changeably. Some methodologists might see these as distinct, pointing out that other researchers like those in education, management and public policy also conduct "ethnographic" investigations. However, in none of these other fields of inquiry is the discipline defined in large part by the use of ethnographic research as described here. 2. Method and methodology differ in that the former is concerned with the nitty-gritty practicalities of data collection and technique, while the latter focuses on epistemological and foundational concerns. 3. See Spiro (1986) for a discussion of epistemological relativism. The strong form of this position holds that it is not possible to make meaningful generalizations about culture because "Significant generalizations and theories can be true and valid, respectively, if and only if they are both group-specific and culturally relative." At the same time, because cultures are never equivalent it is this view holds that it is impossible to gain a true understanding of "The Other," thus vitiating knowledge claims based on experience in the field. 4.1 owe the notion of "historical resonance" to conversations with George Stocking who has been particularly persuasive in arguing that it is important to listen for "historical resonance" between contemporary disci- plinary concerns and the work of earlier anthropologists (Stocking 2000). 5. It is worth noting that Malinowski's method emerged not from privilege, but from an enforced stay with the Trobriands. In a sense, it is a refugee's method rather than a method of privilege. 6. The five papers explicitly concerned with methods and methodology are: "Field Methods and Techniques in Linguistics," by Floyd Lounsbury; "Psychological Techniques: Projective Tests in Field Work," by Jules Henry and Melford Sprio; "Interview Techniques and Field Relations," by Ben- jamin Paul; "Controls and Experiments in Field Work," by Oscar Lewis; and "The Processing of Anthropological Materials," by George Murdock. In addition, although focused mainly on other topics, three additional paper incorporate methodological discussions: "Cultural Values," by FS.C. Northrup; "The Concept of Value in Modern Anthropology," by David Bidney; and "Relations of Anthropology to the Social Sciences and to the Humanities," by Robert Redfield. Introduction to the Transaction Edition xvii

References Cited

Beattie, John. 1965. Understanding an African Kingdom: Bunyoro. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Bernard, H. Russell. 1988. Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Bernard, H. Russell, ed. 1998. Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Bowen, Elizabeth Smith (psuedonym for: Laura Bohannan). 1954. Return to Laughter. New York: Harper. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Cen- tury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Count, Earl W. 1964. Dimensions of fact in Anthropology. In Fact and Theory in Social Science. E.W. Count and G. Bowles, eds. Pp. 85-106. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Diesing, Paul. 1991. How Does Social Science Work ?: Reflections on Practice. Pitts- burgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Foster, George M. 2000. "An Anthropologist's Life in the Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice at UC Berkeley, the Smithsonian, in Mexico, and with the World Health Organization, "an oral history conducted in 1998 and 1999 by Suzanne B. Riess. Berkeley, CA: Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Li- brary, University of California. Gearing, Fred, Robert McC. Netting, and Lisa Peattie, eds. 1960. Documen- tary History of the Fox Project 1948-1959. A Program in Action Anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gottlieb, Alma, and Philip Graham. 1993. Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa. New York: Crown Publishers. Kroeber, Alfred L., ed. 1953. Anthropology Today: An Encylopedic Inventory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E.P. Dutton. Mcllwraith, T.F. 1964. Facts and their recognition among the Bella Coola. In Fact and Theory in Social Science. E.W. Count and G. Bowles, eds. Pp. 183-200. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Naroll, Raoul, and Ronald Cohen, eds. 1970. A Handbook of Method in Cul- tural Anthropology. New York: Natural History Press. Pelto, PerttiJ. 1970. Anthropological Research: The Structure of Inquiry. New York: Harper and Row. Powdermaker, Hortense. 1966. Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropolo- gist. New York: W.W. Norton. XVlll Introduction to the Transaction Edition

Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press. Redfield, Robert. 1930. Tepoztlan: A Mexican Village. Chicago, IL: Univer- sity of Chicago Press. Rubinstein, Robert A. 1991. Reflection and Reflexivity in Anthropology. In Fieldwork: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax. R.A. Rubinstein, ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Schensul, Jean, and Margaret LeCompte, eds. 1999. The Ethnographer's Toolkit. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Spiro, Melford. 1986. Cultural relativism and the future of anthropology. Cultural Anthropology 1:259-286. Spradley, James. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Stocking, George W. 2000. "Do Good Young Man." Sol Tax and the World Mission of Liberal Democratic Anthropology. In Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions. Essays Toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropol- ogy. R. Handler, ed. Pp. 171-264. Madison, WI: University of Wiscon- sin Press. Tax, Sol. 1988. Pride and Puzzlement: A Retro-introspective Record of 60 Years of Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 17:1-21. Vogt, Evon Z. 1994. Fieldwork Among the Maya: Reflections on the Chiapas Project. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Vogt, Evon Z. 1995. Some reflections on long-term fieldwork in anthropology. University of California at Berkeley, Anthropology Emeritus Lecture Series 13 November 1995. Werner, Oswald, and G. Mark Schoeple. 1987. Systematic Fieldwork. Foun- dations of Ethnography and Interviewing. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publi- cations. Foreword

Letters, often a delight to write and to read, are nevertheless, as we all know when we think of it, an inherently unsatisfying means of communication. The reader has no way of grounding what he reads by a sharp look at the writer's expression or the atmosphere of the room in which the sentences were written. Even more bothersome is the time lapse, which makes the respondent always turn out to be answering the question I had last week. These letters work best as communication as the two correspondents, Sol Tax and Robert Redfield, get closer to each other, sharing a common context, seeing each other frequently, connected via their respective family members as well as directly; letters then become part of a continuing conversation and a literal keeping in touch. So one thing we might learn from this interchange has to do with fieldwork supervision: as with many other activities which involve a great deal of intuitive response to situations which are complex and imperfectly predictable, advice from afar does not help very much. Redfield seems to know this and, in the early stages when he is advising from afar, largely confines himself to reassuring comments along the lines of, "You seem to be doing fine." But for us the main interest of the correspondence is in what it tells us about the practice of anthropology. There is a lot to look at here, for the correspondence stretches over six field seasons in which each practitioner is individually evolving his thinking, and in which the relationship itself is evolving and thus becoming part of the intellectual life of each. There is a myriad of events which are part of these processes: trips are taken, housing arranged, horses rented, informants located, illnesses contracted and surmounted. Research strategies and ideas evolve: Sol Tax learns the limitations of survey when he finds that he cannot collect kinship terminology without doing genealogies; data on the economy of Panajachel, first an ethnographic category, become a full-fledged study published as Penny Capitalism. Since the task of the editor of this volume is to place all this in the context of anthropology and the evolution of its professional practice, I will myself simply make a few brief, rather irregular comments.

xix XX Foreword

In making these comments, I must begin by acknowledging that I am in these letters too—Lisa, daughter of Robert Redfield, a member of the field party in Agua Escondida. I appear there to myself as one sees oneself in a faded group photograph: That must be James. . . . And can that be me? Did I really look like that? I certainly remember what it felt like being there as that particular member of the field party. I have the sharpest memories of Guatemala. I was an adolescent, bookish, and a loner at the best of times, whose brother had recently died in a sledding accident back in Illinois, so I lived in the presence of death in a space made for a bookish adolescent to spin in: high above Lake Atitlan with its shifting blue-black water, incoming clouds, and a small volcano. Indians came and went with sharp defended eyes and neck muscles set to pull the weight of the tumpline. My father worked with informants; I learned to make tortillas. A few times I walked to market with giggling girls my own age, but with whom I had almost nothing in common. Mostly I endured the solitude of adolescence in the high space above the Lake, read history, and taught myself to type, conscientiously following the exercises in , the book. Because I was so marginal to the fieldwork enterprise, the Redfield- Tax correspondence provides me now almost as fresh a look at the enterprise as it would for any outsider. I am struck, first, in these letters by the dominance of arrangements. For a good part of one season, Tax had much of his time taken up with arranging the building of a house for the Redfields; but even when it was a question of renting space, the issues of where and how absorb a great deal of energy; when Sol and Gertrude Tax were trying to get started in Chichicastenango, it was a central problem. There • is also transportation: if the Institute provides a vehicle, there is either a paid driver (who turns out to drink heavily) or the bureaucratic hassles of getting a driver's license. Sharing the vehicles, getting the errands done, then becomes another issue of coordination and communication. Food is also a concern: Tax reports that "Marcelino arrived last evening with the eggs and crackers, for which many thanks," and Redfield thanks Tax for a gift of vegetables from the Lake-irrigated plots; shortly thereafter, Redfield writes to Tax: "I have mislaid our grocery list. Did we order canned peas? I cannot find any. Perhaps we neglected to order them. On the other hand, we have 18 cans of sardines in tomato sauce which I do not think we ordered. Do you want these? Also a montdn of salted crackers. Want some?" A young romantic might react with the reeling that these middle-aged professors are making entirely too much of their creature comforts, but the issue is more complex. There are very funny accounts, by Tax, of attempts Foreword xxi to work in the middle of a continuing marimba concert and an Indian family's central living quarters when the strategy was to use borrowed space, and a field trip which had to be cut short when the Taxes could not figure out how to get themselves fed. Arrangements have to be made; the intellectual enterprise has its material base. The issue of arrangements can be seen as part of an even more general theme: the fieldworker, although living in the midst of his or her work in a way which is practically unparalleled in another occu- pation, has nevertheless a private life which must be served. As I sat at my table above the Lake teaching myself to type, I was clearly very marginal to the fieldwork enterprise; but Redfield and Tax also have private lives and are also keeping track of parts of their lives which are outside the fieldwork experience. In 1938, Tax writes, "Is it news to you that the Republicans picked up some 75 or more seats in congress and maybe eight in the senate? . . . More recently, a Polish Jew . . . shot the 3rd Sec'y of the German embassy in Paris to death (meaning to get the ambassador) and touched off a real Pogrom in Germany." Personal demands on the fieldworker appear in immediate physical form: Greta Redfield advises Gertrude Tax on what to do about the baby's diarrhea; Redfield has prolonged bouts of bronchitis; and I myself got diphtheria and was carried off to the hospital in Guatemala City, carrying with me the rest of the fieldwork party. Meanwhile, the fieldworkers are trying to participate and to observe and to keep themselves going personally via a foreign and incompletely absorbed language. Redfield works only in Spanish, but Tax writes in 1935: "As for the language, we are doing the best we can, but don't be too disappointed if, when you come, we cannot speak it. . . . It is hard for me to imagine that in six months (or maybe in five times six months) we will be able to speak it well enough to get into feelings and beliefs of the Indians in their own language. It is hard enough to do that, I suppose, when both the ethnologist (or sociologist) and the subjects have the same native language. We shall have to try, however, for the Spanish spoken here is pretty fragmentary." But at the same time that there are barriers, to some degree impassable, to some degree self-erected, between the fieldworkers and the life which is their subject matter, that life also invades without permission. In 1939 Sol Tax reveals himself as trying to understand, and to cope with, complex recriminations involving his compadre's daughter and wondering, "Do you suppose that I shall be a padrino at 4 or 5 A.M. some morning, or what?" The persons with whom the fieldworker interacts are not simply subject matter but neighbors. This is the context in which, over the years, Tax and Redfield are trying to evolve their own set of practice rules. The rules are to govern xxii Foreword

the translation from a blur of imperfectly noted and still more imperfectly understood social events into words—which are, in the research monograph as in letters, inherently inadequate as a vehicle for information transfer. One can understand the emphasis on "informants" and the focus on traits and lists as ways of professionalizing the acquisition of information in such a way as to preadapt it for filing in the form of words. One can see Redfield's emphasis in the correspondence on combining surveys with community studies as in part a response to the difficulties of representing complex context along with the verbal generalizations. Redfield's argument for the combination does not state this directly: he argues, in 1936, that "it is by intimate, long-term acquaintance with culture groups that one gains insight into the nature of not only that culture, but of culture and society in general." I see this as an attempt to put the abstracting formulation into the context of thicker description to which it can be related intuitively, much as the fieldwork correspondence is enriched when it takes place in the context of joint and parallel activity in the fieldwork site. But what does "intimate and long-term acquaintance" mean, and how is the "insight" gained to be represented in words—those words which are the anthropologist's letters to the world? These questions are being asked lately, but they were not being asked then. One way in which they were avoided was by a set of conventions on the subject matter of anthropology. Tax and Redfield are experi- menting with the conventions as they go along: Redfield proposed, in 1939, that "the memorandum on Spanish-Indian traits . . . confirms my feeling that these problems are less rewarding than others, and that they are not the problems most congenial to either your interests or mine." But there are problems which it does not even occur to them to engage. Redfield began to study quarrels within Agua Escondida, and one sees him and Tax trying to get straight the system of taxation linking local community and national government. But when I revisited Agua Escondida decades later, saw how the population had expanded on what was even in 1939 a rather constricted land base, and thought about the political history of Guatemala in the intervening decades, it struck me as interesting that Ladino-Indian relations had been for Tax and Redfield a topic of the contact of cultures, and that the role of the Lake communities in national politics would have seemed to either a quite unanthropological topic. It would not have occurred to either Redfield or Tax, I believe, to speculate on the role of anthropology within the broad context of the relationship between U.S. society and Guatemala. Foreword xxiii

But it is not simply a question of subject matter. There is a whole set of doubts and difficulties around what it means to say something about the world out there—whether it is in the form of a letter or an anthropological monograph, each of which has its own conventions. Tax and Redfield thought a lot about the practice of fieldwork and proposed to teach about it when they got home. But they did not seem to have wrestled with a theory of practice for anthropology which engaged these deeper issues of what it is to "know" and to "say." It must have been in many ways a happier time to work. It will be interesting for the theoretical sophisticates of our troubled age to see what they can make of this correspondence.

Lisa Redfield Peattie Cambridge, Massachusetts

Preface

Although I did not know Robert Redfield, who died a dozen years before I began studying anthropology, like hundreds of others preparing for fieldwork in Yucatan I read his publications. His writings about the Yucatec Maya villages of Chan Kom and Dzitas, his model of the Folk-Urban continuum, his views on peasant societies, and other aspects of his work were still subjects of lively discussion when I entered graduate school in the early 1970s. At that time, it was nearly impossible to prepare for research in Mesoamerica without seeing Robert Redfield's pervasive influence on the anthropology of the region. Thus, in 1979, three years after returning from my own fieldwork in Yucatan and Belize, I took the opportunity of my recent residence in Chicago to read the Robert Redfield Papers in the University of Chicago Archives. For me, reading these papers was a very special experience. From them emerged a sense of the sharp intellect for which Redfield was widely respected and which is reflected in his publications. But equally compelling, there also emerged from these papers a delightful view of a committed, caring, humane, family- oriented man of great personal integrity. Redfield's student, later friend and colleague, Sol Tax, is present in many different roles in the Robert Redfield Papers. I knew of Sol Tax as a distinguished and very senior anthropologist, mainly through his publications, but also because, in the early 1970s, Tax was inter- nationally prominent as president of the International Union of An- thropological and Ethnological Sciences and founding editor of Current Anthropology. As a graduate student, I read his articles on world view, social relations, and social organization of the highland Maya in Guatemala, and I studied his book about the economy of the Guatemalan municipio of Panajachel, Penny Capitalism. These, like Redfield's publications about Yucatan, were then still important, nearly canonical elements in Mesoamerican anthropological training. The correspondence between Robert Redfield and Sol Tax spans the twenty-five years from 1933 to 1958. Amounting to more than a thousand pages of typewritten text, their letters speak to a wide range of subjects, anthropological and otherwise. The entire corpus of their

XXV xxvi Preface correspondence is worth reading. But especially interesting to me were the letters they exchanged between 1934 and 1941, while Tax was doing ethnographic research in Guatemala under Redfield's direction. I was repeatedly awed and exhilarated as I read these early letters. Little in their publications or the folklore of anthropology that had been related to me as a student prepared me for the literateness, energy, scope, and reflexivity displayed in the letters. The letters resonated deeply with my own anthropological interests in the nature of fieldwork, ethnographic interpretation, the development of our discipline, and the growth of personal and professional relationships in anthropology. When I finished reading the Redfield-Tax letters, I was therefore convinced that their publication would be of great value to anyone interested in anthropology or the development of social science in the United States. Shortly after I finished reading the Robert Redfield Papers, I met Sol and Gertrude Tax. Sol and I soon discovered shared interests, and over the last decade this has become one of my most rewarding personal and professional relationships. From nearly our first meeting, I shared with Sol my enthusiasm about the material in his correspondence with Robert Redfield and urged that he prepare it for publication. In part because the entire twenty-five years of their correspondence is available as number 330 of the University of Chicago Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Cultural Anthropology (entitled April is This Afternoon), and in part because other interests took his attention, Sol demurred at my suggestion. Periodically the topic of the possible publication of the Redfield- Tax letters would come up as we worked together on other projects. But it was not until late 1986 that circumstances led Sol and Gertrude to think seriously about preparing the letters for publication. At that time, it was suggested to Sol that he write a small retrospective volume surveying anthropology from his personal perspective of fifty years of professional activity. Sol thought that it might be valuable in response to publish his entire correspondence with Redfield. Together with Gertrude, he reviewed the letters with that aim in mind. They soon concluded that the correspondence was too large to publish as a whole. Moreover, the letters could naturally be divided into several sections and would, in any event, benefit from careful editing. Feeling that they were too close to the material in the letters to make the needed editorial judgments and knowing my interest in the correspondence, Sol and Gertrude asked if I would like to prepare for publication the letters relating to their Guatemalan fieldwork. This invitation I happily accepted. Preface xxvii

I began my work on the editing of the Redfield-Tax letters by comparing the typescript from which the microfilm version of the correspondence had been prepared with the original letters. In preparing the typescript for microfilming, Sol and Gertrude had made some editorial deletions. These I reviewed, and where I felt it was important to reinstate deleted text, I did so. The result was a consolidated typescript of about 650 pages for the letters exchanged between 1934 and 1941. It was from this consolidated typescript that I prepared this book. Redfield and Tax corresponded about a wide range of topics. Their writing on all of these is interesting, depending upon the reason these letters are consulted. In selecting the material for this book I have focused on what Redfield and Tax had to say to one another about fieldwork, ethnographic understanding, and, to a lesser degree, about anthropology in general during this period. As a result, I reduced the typescript to about 350 pages by omitting materials that did not bear on these topics. I have excluded much of the correspondence devoted to the financial arrangements of Tax's fieldwork and almost all of the fiscal bookkeeping involved. I have also excluded or reduced the amount of material devoted to other topics, for example, material about Tax's personal finances and living arrangements between field seasons. Except in the few cases where I have excluded entire letters because they do not bear on the principal subjects of this book, I have marked omitted material by ellipses. Some of the original letters in the archives are undated. Thus, some of the dates given in this text are estimates based on internal evidence in the letters and on discussions with Sol and Gertrude Tax. As is evident from these letters, both Margaret Redfield and Gertrude Tax were full, if not formally acknowledged, partners in their husbands' fieldwork. However, the bulk of the letter writing between the Redfields and the Taxes was done by Robert and Sol. A few of Greta's and Gertrude's letters are preserved in the Robert Redfield Papers and in the Sol Tax Papers in the University of Chicago Archives. These, however, are mainly brief notes of thanks or advice and do not adequately give voice to Greta's and Gertrude's obviously large contributions. In order not to leave a misleading impression of their importance to the research, I have not included their letters here. Historical and explanatory annotations are provided following the text of each letter where these are needed. Redfield and Tax are quite casual in their placement of diacritical marks and in some spelling. In some instances this informality is purposeful, and I therefore have not regularized their usage. A glossary of non-English words that xxviii Preface

appear in the letters follows the text. In general, I tried to preserve the voice and flow of these letters and to keep the editorial apparatus from becoming intrusive. While preparing these letters for publication I have had much help, for all of which I am grateful. My biggest debt is to Sol and Gertrude Tax for inviting me to edit these letters. They also responded patiently and thoughtfully to my many questions and requests for clarification about their time in Guatemala. I greatly appreciate the support for this project offered by Lisa Redfield Peattie. I am especially grateful for her eloquently reflective Foreword for this book. The originals of the letters reproduced in this book are held in the University of Chicago Archives, Department of Special Collections, The University of Chicago Library. Daniel Meyer, university archivist, and the staff of the Department of Special Collections facilitated, in many ways, my work with the Robert Redfield Papers and with the Sol Tax Papers. I thank them for making my visits to the archives both pleasant and productive. During some of the time that I worked on these letters, Robert E. Moore was cataloging and preparing a guide to the Sol Tax Papers. Although I am sure that it interfered with his own work, he always responded carefully to my requests to track down information or materials in the papers. Especially after I left Chicago and could no longer consult the papers myself, his efforts were exceptionally helpful. Chris Winters, bibliographer for anthropology, the University of Chicago Library, was generous in helping me to find historical and biographical information necessary for my annotation of the letters. I especially appreciate his sharing with me preliminary materials from the International Dictionary of Anthropologists, which he is editing on behalf of the Library Anthropology Resource Group. I have benefited from the support and guidance of Dean Birkenkamp and Kellie Masterson, editors at Westview Press. The obvious care they took with this project meant that their helpful suggestions often extended beyond "simple" editorial matters. It was a pleasure to work with them. From the beginning of this project, Joan Ablon, George Foster, Mary LeCron Foster, Alice B. Kehoe, Charles D. Laughlin, Rik Pinxten, David Maines, Susan CM. Scrimshaw, and George Stocking encouraged my work on it. Each responded generously to my requests for help at various times during this project. I am grateful to each of them for their constant support. I am lucky in that my wife, Sandy Lane, has more than anyone else supported, critiqued, and cared for my work on this book. Those who know her will understand that it is an understatement to say that Preface xxix

I have benefited in innumerable ways from the special manner in which she combines intellectual perspicacity with a gentle and loving personality. Though briefly interrupting my work on this book, the start of a new fieldwork project in a very personal way renewed my belief that the topics discussed by Robert Redfield and Sol Tax bear importantly on our contemporary assessment of the role of fieldwork in anthropological understanding. I hope that others will enjoy these letters and find them as instructive as have I.

Robert A. Rubinstein Cairo, Egypt

FIELDWORK: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield & Sol Tax

Introduction

Reflection and Reflexivity in Anthropology Robert A. Rubinstein

The years between 1930 and the early 1940s were especially important for the development of anthropology in the United States. This was a time of intellectual fervor and, in relation to the previous decades, unparalleled growth. During this period, the subject matter and methods of anthropology in the United States were reoriented and the discipline was revitalized as a profession. The intellectual outlines of post-World War II anthropology in the United States formed in the concerns and experiences of anthropologists working during this time. Eggan (1968:134) characterizes this as the start of the "modern period" of anthropology in the United States. To some degree, today's anthropological discussions still reflect these developments. Robert Redfield and Sol Tax played prominent roles in the development of anthropology in the United States. Beginning in the 1930s, separately and together, they developed lines of research and theory that at first anticipated and later guided the growth of anthropological work on culture change, ethnic relations, kinship analysis, world view, and economics. For anthropology in general, and especially for the study of Mesoamerican ethnology, their work supplied many of the empirical themes and theoretical questions which ethnographers subsequently explored. Through their publications and their supervision of the training of younger anthropologists, their work helped define the major outlines of anthropological research. Moreover, their work has a continuing influence as younger scholars expand upon or criticize it.

For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay I thank Joan Ablon, Peter M. Ascoli, George Foster, Mary LeCron Foster, Alice B. Kehoe, Sandra D. Lane, Charles Leslie, David Maines, Lisa Peattie, Rik Pinxten, Sol Tax, and Necla Tschirgi.

1 2 Introduction

The correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax during the years 1934-1941 is historically important. The letters are resources for understanding the development of anthropology as a professional community. Reading them also gives the opportunity to analyze the earlier experiences of our discipline and to better understand the nature of anthropological data collection and interpretation. These letters offer us the opportunity to put our exploration of the history of anthropology to an epistemologically revitalizing end. This introduction sketches the intellectual, personal, and institu- tional circumstances in which these letters were written. Beyond their historically descriptive importance, the material in these letters con- tributes directly to current concerns about the nature and status of anthropological knowledge. The later part of this introduction relates the letters to contemporary epistemological discussions in anthropology. It is useful, before taking up specifics, to note four general domains of anthropological interest on which these letters bear. First, ethnographic fieldwork is the major method through which anthropologists gather data. The "modern" view of what anthropological fieldwork involves crystallized during the years when these letters were written. This correspondence presents a very clear picture of how two important anthropologists thought about and conducted their field research. From their letters we see how they made decisions during field research about which lines of inquiry to pursue, and about how to gather data to test specific ethnographic hypotheses. Second, Redfield and Tax also corresponded about what they were finding during their research. Thus, these letters contain a wealth of ethnographic data that is useful for understanding how Redfield and Tax arrived at their descriptive and theoretical conclusions. Some of this material, especially their concern with ideational aspects of social life, allows a fresh evaluation of their research programs. Third, no aspect of professional social scientific life is more difficult to master than the construction of social theory. By letting us "overhear" their discussions, reading these letters allows us to follow Redfield's and Tax's development of theory. These letters, thus, to some extent, make public the usually private processes underlying the intellectual give-and-take of social theory construction. Finally, besides giving an opportunity for developing insights into the growth of anthropological knowledge, these letters can help us better understand the growth and development of personal relationships within scientific disciplines. Spanning more than half-a-dozen years, the letters allow us to trace the evolution of the relationship between Redfield and Tax from its student-teacher origin to its mature form of valued colleagues and trusted friends. Introduction 3

Anthropology badly needs straightforward reports of what field researchers really do during their work. How do the pragmatic exi- gencies of extended anthropological fieldwork—including difficulties of housekeeping, personal comfort, funding, and relations with informants—affect the kinds and quality of data we gather? What considerations enter into the choice of a field site, or of the unit of analysis we use? How do the day-to-day activities of fieldwork relate to social theory construction? What is the nature of anthropological apprenticeship, and how does this affect the growth of professional relations in our discipline? What is the relationship between professional publications and fieldwork activities? The material in the correspondence between Robert Redfield and Sol Tax about their fieldwork in Guatemala provides an unparalleled opportunity to explore these, and other, questions.

Redfield, Tax, and Anthropology before World War II

In 1934, the anthropological community of which Robert Redfield and Sol Tax were members was small but growing.1 Between 1902 and 1941 the membership of the American Anthropological Association grew slightly more than fourfold, from 172 to 696. The numbers of Ph.D. degrees awarded each year during this period illustrate this growth. Between 1900 and 1940, 228 doctoral degrees in anthropology were awarded in the United States; 14 during 1901-1910, 20 during 1911-1920, 40 during 1921-1930, and 154 during 1931-1940 (Frantz 1985:84-85). Fifteen universities awarded these degrees, though 111 of the 154 degrees awarded between 1931 and 1940 came from only six departments (Ebihara 1985:102). Before 1930, because of the small size of the anthropological community and because most of its members were trained in a few institutions, the discipline was characterized by a set of shared intellectual commitments. Eggan (1968:130) identifies this as the "American historical school," which derived from the work and teaching of Franz Boas, centered at Columbia University. Important for understanding the intellectual context of the correspondence between Redfield and Tax was the Boasian concern with collecting ethnographic information about Native American groups that were then thought to be disap- pearing. This "salvage ethnography" meant that, especially before the 1930s, in the United States ethnographic fieldwork usually consisted of brief research trips during which a few, mainly older, informants were extensively interviewed. The aim of this work was to record their cultural knowledge so that this material could be used for historical 4 Introduction reconstructions of Native American life. Salvage ethnography often focused on a group's material culture, stressing the collection of artifacts (see Stocking 1968,1976). The emphasis on historical reconstruction led to the development of many anthropological ideas, such as the definition of culture-areas based on the distribution of culture-traits which were accounted for by chronologically oriented distributional maps (Eggan 1968:130). One circumstance affecting the growth of anthropology during the years before World War II was that most professional anthropologists worked outside of academic settings. Not until after World War II did academic employment become the more general pattern for Ph.D. trained anthropologists. Thus, much anthropological research was done by those working in museums, government departments (for example the Bureau of American Ethnology), or research institutions (like the Carnegie Institution of Washington or the National Research Council). As Stocking (1976:9-10) points out, "the customary linkage of ar- chaeology and ethnology in the museum context surely reinforced the historical orientation of anthropological theory, just as the object- orientation of museum collections sustained a particular attitude toward ethnographic data." The unified Boasian character of anthropology in the United States began to change in the 1930s. The emphasis within anthropology began to shift away from concerns with historical reconstruction based on inventorying culture traits and moved toward a focus on contemporary processes and patterns. Some of this new emphasis came from anthropologists trained by Boas. But the shift away from the American historical approach in anthropology also was stimulated from outside, and did not progress much until the 1930s. By then, Robert Redfield, with his interest in the processes of contemporary culture change and a broad ethnographic database from his Maya research, was a leader (along with Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, and others) in this reorientation (Stocking 1976:15-17). Among the things motivating the rethinking of anthropology in the United States at this time was the stimulation provided by Bronislaw Malinowski's and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's advocacy of their synchronic, functionalist approaches to the analysis of culture and society. They both lectured in the United States in 1926 as guests of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation. But the effect of their visit was not fully felt until the 1930s. Their lectures provoked considerable interest and controversy. They departed from American anthropological thought in two main ways. First, their work was based on field research that was substantially different from that current in the United States. Malinowski (1922:6), for instance, described his fieldwork among the Introduction 5

Trobriand Islanders, which he had published in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, for which he lived in "as close a contact with the natives as possible." This method was significantly different than that used in salvage ethnography in the United States and it provided a conception of ethnographic research which American anthropologists sought to emulate. Much methodological reflection in American anthropology followed from the working out of that model. The letters exchanged by Redfield and Tax during their Guatemalan research reflect this concern with how anthropologists can know other peoples. Secondly, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown each brought to the United States a more theoretical approach than was current among American anthropologists. Radcliffe-Brown especially challenged the American historical school by his insistence that "social anthropology" could discover natural laws of human society by applying a comparative approach to social organization. His rejection as conjecture of the uses to which the American historical school put history, and his use of sociological concepts developed by Emile Durkheim, made him a center of controversy and intellectual excitement (see Eggan 1937). In 1931 Radcliffe-Brown came to the University of Chicago as Professor of Anthropology. There he concentrated his attentions on theory in the study of social organization. He remained at the University of Chicago until 1937, when he left to become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University. From Chicago his influence on American anthropology became widespread. At Chicago, Radcliffe- Brown was Tax's doctoral dissertation adviser, and one of Robert Redfield's senior colleagues.

Robert Redfield

Robert Redfield was a remarkable man. Widely admired by colleagues and students for his intellectual abilities and his dedication to high-minded ideals (Hutchins 1958), he had little patience for frivolous conversation. His colleagues and students found him an imposing figure who quickly grasped the essence of even the most specialized theoretical discussions in anthropology. Yet he also always held that the study of humankind meant the study of the whole—the whole person, the whole community (Tax 1958:2). In contrast to this stern demeanor with students and colleagues, Redfield presented a more congenial side of his personality during fieldwork. His collaborator and friend Alfonso Villa Rojas (1958:6) recalled: 6 Introduction

Dr. Redfield was a man of very tender and amiable disposition, especially when dealing with the natives of simple societies. I can remember very clearly how happy and relaxed he was during his long periods of field work, when he had an opportunity to participate in the local activities of the Indians and of being moved by their same feelings and emotions. In this connection he was very different from the man confronting serious matters of theoretical importance with his colleagues and students: then, he was serious, demanding, rigorous, with a devastating logic that made us feel reverence and respect for him.

When he died in 1958, of lymphatic leukemia, Robert Redfield was among the most influential and distinguished anthropologists in the United States. Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1897, Redfield came to anthropology after he had already begun to practice as a lawyer. After receiving a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1921, Redfield joined his father's law firm. The previous year he had married Margaret Lucy Park, the daughter of Robert Park, Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Redfield was discontented with law practice. Following a 1923 visit to Mexico, and with the encouragement of Park, Redfield returned to the University of Chicago to study anthropology. He received his Ph.D. from the University in 1928. Fay-Cooper Cole, who had trained under Boas at Columbia University, headed the anthropology section of the joint sociology and anthropology department at the University. Other anthropology faculty members at the University, like Edward Sapir and Manuel Andrade, were also Boas students. Redfield, however, was most greatly impressed with the work of the Chicago sociologists who were developing an ambitious program of research on urban social life, and these scholars had the strongest influence on Redfield's training. Thus, unlike most of his anthropological contemporaries, Redfield was not a Boasian. In 1926 Redfield returned to Mexico to conduct research for his doctoral dissertation. As a Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, Redfield spent November 1926 to July 1927 studying the Mexican village of Tepoztlan. Pursuing interests he had developed through his contact with Chicago sociology, he sought to better understand the relations of urban and "folk" cultures and the processes by which "primitive man becomes civilized man" (Stocking 1976:17). In doing this research, he departed from his contemporaries in at least three important ways. First, his study of Mexican peasants was unique for its focus on contemporary life, rather than remembered culture. Second, the manner in which he conducted his study—residence among the people whom he studied, and learning their language— departed from the then more common pattern of brief fieldwork stays Introduction 7 using the aid of an interpreter. Third, he focused on a community embedded in a complex social and cultural context, rather than on a well-bounded, relatively isolated social group. Redfield was thus among the first American anthropologists to conduct what we consider today to be normal fieldwork—going to a place and immersing oneself in a community in order to learn about it. In addition, by departing from the common tendency to study Native Americans, Redfield became the first North American anthropologist to do a community study in Mexico (Kemper 1985:140). Between 1925 and 1926 Redfield was an Instructor of Sociology at the University of Colorado. He returned to the University of Chicago in 1927 as an Instructor of Anthropology. In 1928, he became Assistant Professor and was promoted in 1930 to Associate Professor of An- thropology. Soon after, in 1934, he became Professor of Anthropology and the second Dean of the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago, a position he held until 1946, throughout the period of the letters in this book. The University of Chicago Press published Redfield's first book, Tepoztlan, a Mexican Village: A Study of Folk Life, in 1930. During that year he was also appointed Research Associate of the Carnegie Insti- tution of Washington. This appointment ended in 1946. Under these auspices, Redfield directed ethnological and sociological investigations of the peoples of Yucatan and Mexico. In appointing Redfield, Alfred Kidder, director of the Institution's Division of Historical Research since 1929, sought to supplement the Division's archaeological and historical research by expanding its research program to include contemporary ethnological work among the Maya. Redfield set out a broad-based research program covering Yucatan and Guatemala. The letters in this book result from the work done in Guatemala. Before the Guatemala research was undertaken, Redfield and his colleagues had already completed most of their fieldwork for their Yucatan research. In this program, Redfield tried to clarify the relationship among urban and "primitive" peoples in Yucatan by exploring social change and cultural disorganization. To do this he and his colleagues used a model of rural to urban change to guide their research (see Redfield 1941, Hansen 1976). The Yucatan research resulted in several important publications (Redfield and Villa Rojas 1934, Redfield 1941, Villa Rojas 1945), and his theoretical model of the folk-urban continuum was to become one of his more important, though not always understood, contributions to social science in the United States.

Redfield's subject was social change and cultural disorganization. In addition his method of analysis was unfamiliar to anthropologists. The 8 Introduction

heuristic use of a model folk society was misunderstood by historically minded ethnologists, who saw discrepancies between the model and particular folk communities as flaws in the model rather than as invi- tations to analyze the causes of social variations. (Leslie 1968:352)

Redfield planned to study the main urban center in Yucatan and compare it with a series of increasingly more rural and isolated villages. He was helped in this research by two other ethnographers. One, Asael Hansen, worked in Merida, the peninsula's main city (Hansen 1976). The other, Alfonso Villa Rojas, a native of Yucatan, had been a school teacher when Redfield met him in the village of Chan Kom. There he became Redfield's assistant and eventual collaborator. Later, Villa Rojas did an ethnography of the remote village of Tusik in the Department of Quintana Roo. Villa Rojas subsequently became one of Mexico's leading anthropologists. Redfield himself worked in the intermediate villages of Dzitas and Chan Kom. When he extended the Carnegie Institution's research to Guatemala, Redfield sought to test the model of folk-urban social change that he had developed in Yucatan. There he had observed Indian-Ladino differences and he sought to explore the nature and extent of these differences in Guatemala too. But he was also influenced by his more general concerns with racial equality in the United States. These concerns are evident in Redfield's discussion, in his letters to Tax, of the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Acculturation. They also characterized his professional contributions as an "expert witness" in racial discrimination cases later (Ming 1958). Throughout his professional career, Redfield was acutely aware of the tensions between the science and the craft of anthropology. Always demanding rigor, precision, and empathy in anthropological work, Redfield self-consciously sought to make explicit the processes by which we come to understand other peoples. When he sent Sol Tax to Guatemala in 1934, Redfield gave him considerable freedom to develop the research program there as he saw fit. Yet despite busy teaching and administrative loads, Redfield was actively involved in defining what kinds of activities ought to go into anthropological fieldwork and in considering, together with Tax, how to use his experience to improve his fieldwork practice.

Sol Tax

Sol Tax's appointment, in 1934, as an Ethnologist with the Division of Historical Research of the Carnegie Institution of Washington was Introduction 9

a bit of professional good fortune. Good academic jobs and suitable research positions were scarce, so the opportunity to continue as a professional ethnologist in a job with some security was one he welcomed. Redfield wrote Tax, on 18 July 1933, "The question of policy has been decided in favor of extending the ethnological work of the Carnegie Institution into Guatemala. ... I would like to propose an understanding whereby you would begin the study of Spanish with the likelihood . . . that you would begin fieldwork about January 1935." Tax accepted immediately and he and his wife Gertrude (nee Gertrude Jospe Katz) began studying Spanish and the few ethnological materials about Guatemala that were then available. Sol Tax was born in Chicago, Illinois on 30 October 1907. He grew up mainly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Tax studied anthropology with Ralph Linton, whose friend he became. For his Ph.B. degree (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1931) he submitted a thesis, A Re-Interpretation of Culture, with an Examination of Animal Behavior, which sought to integrate cultural and biological aspects of anthropology. Following Linton's advice, in 1931 Tax entered the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago to study for a Ph.D. under the direction of Radcliffe-Brown. Redfield was already an established faculty member in the Department when Tax came to the University and was his principal graduate advisor (Hinshaw 1979:761). Tax was mostly influenced during his graduate studies by Radcliffe-Brown, and by his continuing association with Ralph Linton. During his graduate education, Tax read and commented critically on the manuscript for Linton's influential The Study of Man, published in 1936. In this book Linton introduced to American anthropology the concepts of "status" and "role" and insisted that anthropology should separate conceptually the study of "culture" and "society." Tax sought to integrate Linton's and Radcliffe-Brown's views, at one point organizing and chairing a debate between them. Tax had his first experiences of anthropological research as a member of two archaeologically-oriented field schools in 1930 (the Logan Museum Archaeological Expedition to Algeria and the American School of Prehistoric Research in Europe). His participation in the Summer Ethnology Program at the Mescalero Indian Reservation, directed by Ruth Benedict in 1931, marked his first intensive ethnological experience. Tax conducted research for his doctoral dissertation (1932-1933) among Central Algonquin peoples, focusing on questions concerning the history and meaning of kinship. This research was very much in the mode set by Radcliffe-Brown and during it Tax developed the ego- less kinship chart and the notion that kinship relations were based on 10 Introduction accommodation among universal rules and principles present in small societies. Tax was in the midst of his field research for his doctoral dissertation when Redfield's invitation to join the Carnegie's Maya Research Project reached him at the Menominee Indian Reservation. Redfield's selection of Tax for the research project in Guatemala was a natural choice. Having known Tax as a student at the University of Chicago, Redfield was aware of his enormous energy and enterprise. Tax's professional interests were also broad, an important advantage in a researcher being sent to open an area to anthropological exploration. But perhaps more importantly, Redfield found in Tax an ethnologist who, because of his training with Linton and Radcliffe- Brown, was prepared to think theoretically about the organization of society. The Taxes left for Guatemala directly after Sol defended his doctoral dissertation. Tax carried with him several letters of introduction to businessmen, government officials, and missionaries whom Redfield had met during a reconnaissance trip the year before. For the next six years they conducted research there, returning to the United States each summer. During this time Tax and Redfield were consistently interested in exploring ways to improve anthropological fieldwork and the knowledge gained by this method. In 1940 they began to plan seminars on fieldwork methods. As Hinshaw (1979:761) notes, "Tax's early and continuing interests in the training of anthropologists and the more central theoretical and methodological concerns of the discipline" are often overshadowed by his later work. Nonetheless, they are clearly evident in the letters to Redfield from Guatemala. Tax's research in Guatemala resulted in the definition of the cultural patterning of the Highland Maya. Together with Redfield, Tax helped to define the shape of Mesoamerican ethnology. In influential publications Tax proposed the municipio as the central organizational unit of the region, detailed the features of Indian economics, and reported on world view in the highlands (Tax 1937, 1941, 1953). In his work in the highlands, Tax reported "more impersonalism in social interaction than Redfield found in Yucatan communities of comparable size, raising questions about the origins of impersonal, atomistic, and pragmatic social relations in urban, industrial society given the same qualities of social interaction among the highland Maya" (Hinshaw 1979:762). It has been suggested that relations between Tax and Redfield suffered because of Tax's departure from the model proposed in Redfield's folk-urban continuum. In fact, as their letters show, they each took this result as a problem for anthropological theory and method. Throughout their association their relationship deepened, centered in Introduction 11 part on their shared interest in making explicit the processes of fieldwork and ethnographic understanding. In 1941, with funding from the Carnegie Institution, the Taxes went to Mexico. There Tax spent one year as Visiting Professor at the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in Mexico, and started fieldwork in Chiapas. Tax's fieldwork and training of Mexican anthropology students in research methods lasted four years. Thus, the interest that emerged in Guatemala in the development and teaching of ethnographic research methods was put to immediate use:

Aside from his courses on Maya ethnology and his fieldwork seminar, Tax was caught up in the endless round of meetings and arrangements among the acronymic anthropological agencies ... as well as in frequent briefings at the U.S. Embassy. Not only was he able to learn about a variety of projects, actual and proposed, he also managed to gain support from Mexican and U.S. sources to continue his initial fieldwork project in the Tzotzil area of Zinacantan, Chiapas, beyond the initial season conducted in late 1942. (Kemper 1985:149).

From 1940 until 1944 Tax was Research Associate in the De- partment of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. In 1944 he was appointed Associate Professor in the Department, and four years later became Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Tax remained associated with the University of Chicago for the rest of his academic career (Rubinstein in press).

Fieldwork and Reflexivity

Despite their concern with improving fieldwork methods, and their attempt to explicate the nature of ethnographic understanding, Red- field's and Tax's efforts are today largely misunderstood by a younger generation of anthropologists, with whom they had relatively little personal contact. In any discipline, work does not simply "speak for itself." Rather, its status and how it is valued derive from what is said about that work later on. Latour (1987:27-28) describes this process: "the status of a statement depends on later statements. It is made more or less of a certainty depending on the next sentence that takes it up; this retrospective attribution is repeated for the next new sentence, which in turn might be made more of a fact or of a fiction by a third, and so on. . . ." 12 Introduction

The process of retrospective attribution depends upon claims made about earlier work, not necessarily on the examination of the work itself. Thus, this process may institutionalize partial or inaccurate descriptions of the earlier work. For this reason, it is sometimes useful to question the characteristics attributed to earlier work in contemporary discussions. The characterizations of Redfield's and Tax's work in current discussions of fieldwork and ethnographic interpretation incorporate such distortions. Reexamining their Guatemalan correspondence may help, therefore, to shed new light on contemporary debates about the nature of anthropological fieldwork and the status of anthropological knowledge. Because of its central place in anthropological discussions, fieldwork is both the most fundamental and least understood aspect of social research. The kind of fieldwork in which anthropologists primarily engage, participant-observation, is one of two activities—the other, the systematic construction of social theory from controlled comparisons among human groups—that give the discipline its distinctive character. Yet anthropological fieldwork, and how it relates to theory construction, remains one of the most uncritically described and inaccurately understood domains of anthropological activity. This is paradoxical because during the past two decades the anthropological literature has been virtually flooded with methods texts and with "reflexive reflections" on anthropological fieldwork and theory.2 Part of the critical reaction to Redfield's and Tax's work derives from the intensive critique of anthropology that has been taking place during the last two decades. This critique focuses particularly on the epistemological status of its major research activities: doing fieldwork and writing ethnographies, the vehicles through which anthropological theory develops. During this self-critical movement, anthropology has been declared "in crisis," "at a watershed moment," and in the midst of an "experimental moment" (e.g., Marcus and Cushman 1982, Wilford 1990:16), forcing us to recognize the highly tentative status of anthropological constructs and to confront the disorienting conclusion that there is no stable "cultural-self" on which these constructs can rest (Bellah 1977:ix). The analyses advanced during this discussion have captured the imagination of the general public and of professional anthropologists (for example, see Rabinow 1977, Freeman 1983, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Van Maanen 1988, Wilford 1990). Central to these analyses is the recognition that anthropological knowledge is incomplete and often contradictory: different ethnographers sometimes report different "realities" (compare Redfield 1930 and Lewis 1951, Mead 1928, 1930 and Freeman 1983). Moreover, issues of power and perspective (Mascia-Lees, et al. 1989), questions of how Introduction 13

authoritative knowledge is legitimated (Hufford 1982a, 1982b, 1983), of self-awareness and authenticity of voice in the presentation of data (Geertz 1988, Van Maanen 1988), and of the constraints of the historical and cultural contexts within which knowledge develops (Pinxten 1981, Rubinstein et al. 1984:123-159, Laughlin et al. 1986) complicate the description and understanding of cultural and social life. There have been a variety of critical responses to the acknowl- edgment of the tentative nature of anthropological knowledge (compare, for example, Pinxten 1981, Clifford and Marcus 1986, and Roth 1987). Of these, two approaches have been particularly prominent within anthropology. The first seeks to overcome the epistemological difficulties by carefully prescribing methods for anthropological research, thus denning the nature and scope of anthropology. Those taking this approach would define the "minimum standards for ethnography" necessary to ensure the quality of ethnographic data and interpretation (Jarvie 1967, Werner 1984, Werner et al. 1987), and have at times appeared to place considerations of method above other aspects of anthropology, practicing "scientism" or "methodolatry" (Rubinstein 1984:173-178; 1989:26).3 More noticeably, however, a self-consciously reflective form of response dominates the last two decades. This approach—often termed postmodernism—bespeaks a deep sense of self-doubt and a mistrust of fundamental aspects of the practice of anthropology.4 In its baldest form, postmodernist anthropology claims that ethnographies are best examined as imaginative, literary constructions rather than as social science. Postmodernist anthropology explicitly examines ethnographic representation (as manifest in social theory and in ethnographic writing), and it incorporates within it a peculiar view of fieldwork derived from reflections on individual fieldwork experiences (e.g., Rabinow 1977). In this view fieldwork is portrayed as a hopelessly unsystematic, even haphazard, activity plagued with insurmountable problems of understanding (if by understanding is meant describing and accounting for a "real" world), for which anthropologists are ill-prepared and ill- served by their training. This view of the inadequacies of anthropological practice is said to emerge from the confrontation of the epistemological and methodological difficulties evident in reflective discussions of anthropological research. In fact, however, this characterization of anthropological practice (and that of those seeking minimal standards for ethnography, for that matter) depends on a particular history of the discipline which emphasizes how little guidance fieldworkers received from their professors before their first field experience. 14 Introduction

The trading of aphoristic stories about their own fieldwork experiences has probably been a part of anthropology since its formal incorporation as a discipline. From such story telling, an oral tradition developed among anthropologists in which the storyteller-ethnographer (fearless or frightened, puzzled or self-confident, for instance) con- fronted and overcame difficulties in his or her fieldwork. Often, these were difficulties said to result from lack of training. This educational deficit was then authenticated by a story about the lack of guidance given by professors. For instance, Radcliffe-Brown is said to have replied in response to a request from his students at the University of Chicago for advice on how to conduct their fieldwork: "Get a large notebook and start in the middle because you never know which way things will develop" (Tax and Rubinstein 1986). Especially when told by accomplished ethnographers, these stories take on an immediacy and importance for their less experienced colleagues. Yet these stories were apocryphal; they told only partial truths. The storyteller-ethnographers told the story in a context and for a purpose—to reveal something about their teachers, about themselves, or about fieldwork, or simply to pass the time. Few of these stories were told, I think, as a way of describing the teller's full preparation for fieldwork. Eventually, this oral tradition transmuted into a written tradition and took on a status independent of the storyteller. At first the weight of this tradition was used to account for the need for explicit methodological texts in anthropology (e.g., Pelto 1970:ix). Later, these detached stories became the ground upon which to indict the entire anthropological enterprise as methodologically naive or epistemologically preposterous, requiring a shift in focus away from "the other" and onto ourselves (Rabinow 1977, Clifford and Marcus 1986). Within scholarly communities, written histories—especially those published in peer-reviewed forums—have a great deal more authority than their oral counterparts (Hufford 1983). Yet these histories may be no more complete than the oral tradition from which they originate. It is only that, reported out of their original oral context, the partial and purposeful nature of the stories is obscured. For example, Sol Tax, who reported Radcliffe-Brown's remark if asked about his fieldwork preparation, would have gone on to say that before Radcliffe-Brown's remark he had taken courses in the logic and method of scientific enquiry as part of his graduate training, and that he had previously participated in an ethnographic field school (Tax 1988:3). Written accounts of lack of fieldwork preparation are no less apocryphal than their oral precursors, and no less purposeful; they are written with both a purpose and a point of view. This may be to Introduction 15 encourage a particular type of methodological education (Pelto 1970, Appell 1989), legitimate a particular epistemological preference (Clif- ford and Marcus 1986), or to present oneself in a particular light (Van Maanen 1988, Sangren 1988).5 I do not wish to argue that all was or is now well in the instruction of ethnographic technique in anthropology, or that fieldwork is an activity that can be straightforwardly carried out if the proper methods are adequately taught to an ethnographer before he or she goes to the field. On the contrary, it is remarkable that after nearly two decades of self-conscious self-reflection, anthropologists seem little closer than they were in 1970 to understanding the fundamental anthropological activities of fieldwork and comparative theory construction as collective undertakings. It is remarkable, but perhaps not surprising. For the most part, reflections on fieldwork published in the postmodernist tradition have not principally been about fieldwork at all, but rather about our experience of fieldwork. To the extent that the reflective accounts of fieldwork and ethnographic representation have focused attention on the characteristics and accomplishments of individual anthropologists, they have failed to engage the epistemological quandaries faced by anthropologists as members of a community of practitioners seeking to systematically explore an area of knowledge. Methods texts have, also, gone to great trouble to show how anthropological research can adapt to issues first identified and elaborated in other social science disciplines, such as face and construct validity, reliability, and generalizability. In pursuing this goal, great importance is placed on developing "systematic, objectifiable research tools" (Pelto and Pelto 1978:36). Such issues are elaborated at length, often at the expense of the examination of the more mundane and less attractive, but equally important, aspects of fieldwork—including the pragmatic details of doing fieldwork and how such arrangements affect the data one gathers and the interpretation of these data. Moreover, and more detrimental to the discipline, as I show below, is that some of these reflective accounts have distorted our understanding of the history of American anthropology. Because these accounts, written for publication, have treated fieldwork as a necessary if peripheral aspect of the task of understanding ourselves, they have institutionalized the partial and inaccurate picture of fieldwork training that persisted in the oral lore of anthropology. It is because methodolatrist and postmodernist accounts of fieldwork both fail to examine (though for different reasons) the processes and social organization through which anthropological apprenticeship takes place that our 16 Introduction

understanding of the dynamics of fieldwork and theory construction remains so meager. The Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago trained many professional anthropologists now active in the discipline. Given the importance of that Department to American anthropology, and the enduring importance of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax to that Department, the chance to examine closely their professional correspondence about fieldwork in Guatemala provides an opportunity to reconsider the development of anthropological practice in the United States. The yield of this exploration is exceedingly rich. The remaining sections of this introduction point to some of the themes in contemporary discussions of fieldwork and ethnography to which the Correspondence relates. When viewed from the perspective of current debates, in my view, the historical material in these letters takes on an immediacy that can help to serve to refocus this "experimental moment" in anthropology and deepen our understanding of our discipline.

Anthropology as Science

Being an anthropologist can be uncomfortable. Most obviously, sometimes fieldwork conditions are unappealing or physically unpleasant (Chagnon 1977). Less concretely, anthropologists are always in some sense outsiders: "marginal natives" (Freilich 1970), and "professional strangers" (Agar 1980). But more profoundly, the complexities of their collective enterprise and the status of their knowledge have always troubled some anthropologists. In response to difficulties inherent in anthropological work, some have attempted to understand the com- plicated interactions among anthropological researchers and their subject matters through reasoned and measured analyses (e.g., Redfield 1926, Bateson 1936, 1972, White 1938, Tax et al. 1956, Naroll and Cohen 1970, Pinxten 1981, Hufford 1982, Briggs 1986, Fiske and Shweder 1986). All too often, however, responses to epistemological difficulties in anthropology are refracted through thick polemic lenses, and anthropological unease is expressed by the assertion of one or more dichotomies: Anthropology seeks either to produce a body of laws which account for human social relations (thus it is a nomothetic enterprise) or to describe the variety of ways in which people organize their social and cultural lives (thus it is an idiographic discipline). Anthropological accounts are either stable and independent of time (thus existing in the "ethnographic present") or else they are situationally contingent. An- thropologists study objective realities (social facts) or else their subject Introduction 17 matter is evanescent. Social and cultural behavior results either from nature or from nurture. Anthropologists are objective observers or they are partisans. Either society's basic homogeneity renders it understand- able or intra-societal variation makes such understanding futile. Eth- nographies are either straightforward narratives, thus showing "naive realism" or they are self-conscious, imaginative, literary constructions. These oppositions turn complex epistemological issues into seem- ingly simple dichotomies.6 All are partial restatements of the apparent opposition that has troubled anthropologists: Anthropology is either a science or it is something else. The issue since World War II has really been: Anthropology is either a science—like physics—or the knowledge it produces is not legitimate or reliable or useful. The question of whether anthropology—or sociology, or political science, or other disciplines that seek to systematically study aspects of social relations—is science or not has been repeatedly asked throughout this century. However, it was not until after the Second World War that the status of the discipline as science became invested with the exceptionally heavy load that it still carries today. Before the Second World War the question of how one could adequately characterize science brought several competing responses, perhaps especially in the United States. These responses fit roughly one of two general trends. One derived from an analysis closely linked to the pragmatist tradition in philosophical thought (for example that of Dewey or Peirce) while the other followed a logical empiricist (also called logical positivist) approach. During this period, neither the pragmatist nor the logical empiricist approach could claim to have adequately accounted for scientific activity. Instead they offered differing answers to questions about the meaning and logic of inquiry, the nature of scientific progress, the status of scientific theories, and the like. Logical positivism saw the task of science as translating immediate experience into logical categories and relations so that "the meaning of a theory was essentially a function of its logical syntax along with the class of things or objects to which the (non-logical) terms in the theory refer" (Aronson 1984:5). From this emphasis on the formal relations of syntactic structure it followed that meaning and knowledge ought to be stable and independent of the person who discovered them and of their context. In contrast to this, pragmatist analyses emphasized that all knowledge-gathering processes are both privileged and restricted; they direct attention to some aspects of phenomena and away from others. Moreover, this analysis suggested that meaning derived from symbolic relations and thus that all knowledge is polysemic. Therefore a single account is always incomplete in some fundamental way (Almeder 1973, 1975). One result of this is that knowledge is 18 Introduction always viewed as contingent on the contexts in which, and the purposes for which, it is acquired. Eventually, one particular version of the logical positivist account of science eclipsed other accounts (see Suppe 1977) and for a time it appeared to be the correct analysis of what science should be like. Yet before World War II there was a pluralism—and tolerance—in discussions of the epistemological status of the knowledge embodied in the social science disciplines. Some scholars rejected the logical positivist program as a standard for judging epistemological questions because it required a very restricted view of what counted as legitimate empirical knowledge, even while they saw it as offering an adequate model of science (Suppe 1977:6). It was in this atmosphere of epistemological pluralism that Robert Redfield and Sol Tax approached the question of whether anthropology is or is not a science. The epistemology underlying their work was eclectic. Both Redfield and Tax considered anthropology to be a science. But this claim has to be understood in the intellectual context in which it was made. For Redfield and Tax, science was not a restricted and restricting exercise. Rather, it was a systematic investigation of human social life undertaken with careful attention both to its observable and intangible aspects. This meant that they moved freely among various methods and theories—as these seemed important—in seeking to better understand social and cultural life. In their field research and theory construction, they did not see themselves as facing questions which required discrete choices between two alternatives. They sought an appropriate, though complex and difficult to find, balance among continuous options (Redfield 1926). It was not an accident that one of Robert Redfield's major theoretical efforts was to develop the folk- urban continuum (Redfield 1941):

Redfield maintained that the intellectual structure for scientific studies of mankind was necessarily pluralistic ... he reasoned that every set of ideas employed some modes for ordering and interpreting phenomena and neglected others, all conceptual approaches to human experiences were partial and incomplete views of them (Leslie 1976:152).

The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax presents us with a chance to recapture the deep epistemological commitment to pluralism in our pursuit of understanding human social and cultural life.7 During and immediately following World War II scholars (and other consumers of research) came to equate science with the technological innovations and successes that were then so conspicuous. These technological Introduction 19 advances derived from the physical sciences which the logical positivist program seemed to characterize quite adequately. This confusion of science with its product, technology, was mistaken (Count 1948a, 1948b), but, nevertheless, widespread. Soon it began to seem obvious that legitimate knowledge is that derived through science, that science is done by researchers who are neutral and objective and adhere rigorously to a process called "The Scientific Method," and that this method led to predictions based on universal laws. Self-conscious about the status of their work, yet wanting to secure and to expand their claims to the resources they needed to support that work, many anthropologists after World War II were caught up in the enthusiasm surrounding science. Often they sought legitimacy in the argument that their work too was scientific, and they measured their success as science against a positivist conception of science. Some argued that when thus measured, the discipline was found wanting and so it ought to be remade by requiring that anthropologists work in an explicitly positivist fashion (e.g., Jarvie 1967, Fritz and Plog 1970, Schneider 1974). Others argued that there was no point in pretending that anthropology is science; rather than aping the physical sciences, anthropology ought to be seen for what it is—a literary-interpretive enterprise (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Proponents of each of these sharply drawn alternative views stress that what is lacking in anthropology is an epistemological sophistication, and that this deficiency has been characteristic of the work of earlier anthropologists. Anthropology has neither, on the one hand, the epistemological rigor of the "real sciences" nor the epistemological subtlety of literary-philosophical disciplines, on the other. Each un- abashedly offers to supply this needed sophistication. There is more than a little irony in this offer. In place of the "unsophisticated" anthropology of their predecessors—who sought to reconcile the complexities of anthropological research through an epistemology that valued methodological and theoretical diversity— both alternatives advance comparatively narrow—but, we are assured, sophisticated—versions of "good anthropology." In my view, both alternatives beg the epistemological issues that are raised by squarely facing the question of the scientific status of anthropology. Taking up these issues necessarily means attempting to understand better the nature of science. It has been fairly clear since the 1960s that the positivist model is not an adequate characterization of what it means to be "scientific," either in general (Suppe 1977:619¬ 632) or specifically in relation to anthropology (Rubinstein et al. 1984). Neither the methodolatrist nor postmodernist approaches to the status of anthropological knowledge recognize this. Instead, both positions 20 Introduction start by accepting the positivist conception of science as an accurate model of the scientific enterprise against which to evaluate anthropology. One then seeks to legitimate anthropological knowledge by showing that it can conform to this model of science while the other seeks refuge in the claim that anthropology is really a literary-interpretive enterprise (Carrithers 1990). Neither position does much to advance our understanding of what it means to study human social life, or any other domain, scientifically. During a time when scholars are recognizing the tentative, situational, and reflexive nature of scientific knowledge (Mayr 1982:35, Hufford 1982a:ix-xxiv, Rubinstein et al. 1984:141-159, Bartley 1987:7; Hawking 1988:18), looking with a renewed seriousness at early attempts—like those of Redfield and Tax—to understand anthropology as science will, I believe, help enrich and advance our contemporary epistemological understanding.

Reflection and Reflexivity in Fieldwork Training

In putting forward their "epistemologically sophisticated" accounts, anthropologists following the postmodernist and methodolatrist options have created a partial, and inaccurate, history of their discipline. Both approaches reject as critically naive the work of earlier anthropologists. Since about 1970, authors often present accounts of their fieldwork, intending to lead us back to examining fundamental aspects of the fieldwork experience and how these affect our knowledge. Such accounts can be very instructive, especially when they direct our attention to epistemological and methodological issues that affect anthropology as a collective enterprise. Van Maanen (1988) discusses the different self-images projected by authors of "tales of the field." Sometimes, in the course of constructing those self-images, reflections on fieldwork produce idiosyncratic interpretations of a fieldworker's personal experiences, drawing our attention away from the collective enterprise of anthropology even while insisting that their intention is the contrary. Since stories of preparation (or lack of it) for fieldwork are often used as props in the construction of the self-image presented, it is perhaps not surprising that accounts of this preparation are reshaped as they are refracted through the lens of self-presentation. It is, again, ironic that it is those accounts, offered as explicitly reflexively-reflective about fieldwork, that prove to include the most highly refracted, and historically partial, picture of anthropological training and of the fieldwork process. Paul Rabinow's Reflections on Introduction 21

Fieldwork in Morocco, considered by many to be the seminal reflexive- reflection on fieldwork, reports fieldwork preparation at the University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology—the same department in which Redfield and Tax worked and taught. Although it is much lauded by those following the postmodernist approach to anthropology, Reflections on Fieldwork is a troubled and troubling work. Like other reflexive essays in the postmodernist genre, it at times seems almost contrived to make a point rather than to accurately reflect the fieldwork experience. Thus, for instance, Rabinow says:

I went to sleep immediately, but woke up from a fitful night saying to myself that I had probably made a grave professional mistake, because the informant is always right. . . . If the informant was always right, then by implication the anthropologist had to become a sort of non-person, or more accurately a total persona. He had to be willing to enter into any situation as a smiling observer and carefully note down the specifics of the event under consideration. . . . This was the position my professors had advocated: one simply endured whatever inconveniences and annoy- ances came along. One had to completely subordinate one's own code of ethics and conduct, and world view, to 'suspend disbelief,' as another colleague was proud of putting it, and sympathetically and accurately record events (Rabinow 1977:45-46, emphasis added).

In contrast to this, Redfield's and Tax's letters contain many discussions of how far one ought to go in "subordinating one's code of ethics and conduct" during fieldwork and about how to test the adequacy of informants' reports. For instance, bearing on the prop- osition that the faculty at Chicago taught that "the informant is always right," Tax, summarizing previous discussions with Redfield, writes on 28 March 1941:

B. There are informants, yes; but no "informant method." C. Ways of stimulating an informant by argument: 1. "I don't believe it" 2. Citing contrary information by somebody else. 3. Pointing out inconsistency of a general statement with a special fact. 4. Pointing out a logical inconsistency.

While Rabinow was studying anthropology at Chicago, Tax was a senior member of the department, though Redfield had been dead for some years. Nonetheless, Redfield's field notes and diaries (and 22 Introduction

Tax's for that matter) were available in the University Library and students they had trained—using a system of careful supervision described in this Correspondence—were teaching on the faculty. It is highly unlikely that the faculty was of one voice in maintaining that "the informant is always right" or, for that matter, in suggesting that researchers abandon their own code of ethics.8 Rabinow's is an account written for publication, thus for an audience. Like other postmodernist writing in anthropology, its purpose is personally reflective but not, I think, reflexive in the treatment of fieldwork as a collective undertaking. It is more a personal recounting of, and meditation on, his own reactions to his experiences in Morocco than it is a reflexive contribution to the understanding of the process of doing fieldwork. To be truly reflexive, accounts of fieldwork must apply lessons from the field to the interpretation and gathering of data.

If discussion of one's relation to the fieldwork process is treated as a task that is independent of interpreting the data, however, the status quo of linguistic and ethnographic reporting will be preserved. The problem of translating awareness of the need for reflexivity into procedures for systematically analyzing the effect of the fieldworker's presence on the data has scarcely been discussed (Briggs 1986:120).

At their best, reflections on fieldwork are also reflexive in that they both inform the interpretation of data and offer honest instruction about how particular fieldwork activities affected the kind and quality of the data collected. For instance, by relating the pragmatic arrangements used to overcome difficulties in gathering data about a particular topic to the discovery of theory, Strauss (1987:40-54) is able to explain the crucial role of experience in research. Briggs (1986:39-60) shows how we might misunderstand data derived from interviews, because the interview is sometimes an artificial communicative event that is subject to differing interpretations by the interviewer and his or her informants. Briggs' analysis rests on the detailed reflective—and reflexive—treatment of his own fieldwork in New Mexico. He shows how the interview, as social scientists understand it, can suppress the natural communication norms in a society, replace them with other conflicting norms, and produce data that may mislead the naive researcher. Separating reflections on fieldwork which contribute to our understanding of fieldwork as a collective enterprise from idiosyncratic recountings of personal experience is not always a straightforward matter. But the following description of how to move back and forth Introduction 23 between the personal and professional sides of field research is instructive:

. . . resonances between the personal and the professional are the source of both insight and error. You avoid mistakes and distortions not so much by trying to build a wall between the observer and the observed as by observing the observer—observing yourself—as well, and bringing the personal issues to consciousness. . . . You dream, you imagine, you superimpose and compare images, you allow yourself to feel and then try to put what you feel into words. Then you look at the record to understand the way in which observation and interpretation have been affected by personal factors, to know the characteristics of any instrument of observation that make it possible to look through it but also introduce distortion in that looking (Bateson 1984:161).

Such reflections need not be written for publication. Indeed, it may be best if they are recorded without thought of publication. In this latter instance the researchers are freer to record raw, even unappealing, private reactions that they might alter in public presen- tations.

Reflexivity in Practice: Guatemala 1934-1941

Reflexivity in practice is a feature of good anthropological research. This does not necessarily mean that good anthropological work must be part of an explicitly "reflexive research program." Rather, reflexivity—the active analysis and application of our experience to improve our data collection and interpretation—ought to be an integral part of the everyday practice of professional anthropologists.9 Such reflexivity is a skill that must be learned. Yet the suggestion in published accounts of anthropological fieldwork is that either such training has not occurred in the past (and it is therefore a recent area of concern), or that we do not have a clear idea of how it develops. This is the problem of anthropological apprenticeship. Accounts of "coming of age" in anthropology too often obscure, rather than clarify, the process of anthropological apprenticeship because they often also have a separate purpose of creating and maintaining a particular professional self-image (Van Maanen 1988). This unclear picture of the training of professional intuition makes it more difficult to evaluate anthropological research reports. Because the processes through which anthropologists are trained to be reflexive 24 Introduction in fieldwork is unclear, instances of the thoughtful application of experience to research problems are not readily apparent. Instead, accounts of reflexivity in fieldwork become descriptions of moments of insight. Yet such "Eureka!" events are the exception rather than the rule in scientific activity. This problem is especially great when the work considered is relatively old; we are too likely to assume that our predecessors were less sophisticated than we now are. This assumption rests on a faulty understanding of scientific progress as linear and cumulative, which derives from the model of social science as social physics (Glymour 1983). It is not that we do not have improved tools and methods for research and interpretation. Rather, the quality of the use to which any of our methods is put depends critically on the primary instrument of anthropology—ethnographers themselves. We should therefore be more considered than we are in judging earlier work. Several themes emerge from Redfield's and Tax's letters that are interesting in the context of contemporary discussions of ethnography and ethnology. Throughout the course of their correspondence, Redfield and Tax show concern with: (1) understanding what differences there might be in ethnographic accounts rendered by different ethnographers, especially between "indigenous" ethnographers and non-native ethnographers; (2) understanding methods for establishing the veracity of information collected from informants; (3) the relative merits of focusing on "objective"—material and behavioral—aspects versus ideational aspects of Guatemalan community life; (4) the appropriate unit of analysis and its relation to their theoretical work; and (5) the effect of pragmatic arrangements—like where one lives—on the ethnographic data collected. The observation that ethnographers often report "different realities" after having studied the same community is now something of a commonplace. When Redfield and Tax went to work in Guatemala this observation was still new. Two other researchers had made ex- plorations of Chichicastenango, Guatemala, before Tax's arrival there. One, Schultze-Jena, was a German geographer; the other, Ruth Bunzel, an American anthropologist. Before arriving in Chichicastenango Tax had read, in German, Schultze-Jena's work about Quiche social life. Bunzel did not publish her results until 1952, well after Tax's and Redfield's Guatemalan fieldwork. Yet anthropology in the United States was a small enough professional community that Tax and Redfield had some idea of what she found there. Shortly after he began his Guatemalan fieldwork Tax reports to Redfield that he is finding disparities between his data for Chichicas- tenango and those reported by Schultze-Jena. In discussing these Introduction 25 differences Tax and Redfield puzzle about what their causes might be. In a letter to Redfield on 15 December 1934, Tax suggests that in part the differences between their data may result from differences in their use of informants: Schultze-Jena, he discovers, relied too heavily on a single informant. Their discussions of these issues suggest that Redfield and Tax were aware of and interested in the sources of potential discrepancies in ethnographic understanding that can emerge when two researchers work in the same place. Rather than treat such discrepancies as a competitive opportunity to topple the interpretations of a fellow anthropologist (as seems to be the practice today, see Hawkins 1984 or Freeman 1983 for instance), Redfield and Tax saw this as a problem in anthropological epistemology and fieldwork method. (It is worth noting that this interest predates by several decades the now famous differences between Redfield's original account of Tepotzlan, based on fieldwork he had done in the 1920s, and the conflicting account presented twenty years later in the restudy of Tepotzlan by Oscar Lewis. For an account of this and of other similar disputes, see Heider 1988:73-81.) The letters trace Redfield's and Tax's concerns with making methods of field research explicit. Beyond method per se they took their work in Guatemala as an opportunity to try to establish the ways in which indigenous ethnography might differ from that made by an outside anthropologist. To this end, their letters trace a concern with working with local people as collaborators in their ethnographic research. They did not phrase their interests as we might today—in terms of power and perspective, of self-awareness and authenticity of representation in ethnography, or in terms of the constraints of the historical and cultural contexts within which they worked. Yet, in a different idiom, these are the concerns addressed by Redfield and Tax as they discuss the differences that might result from research conducted in a single community by a native researcher as opposed to that of a non-native anthropologist. During their last field season they tried to establish a controlled context to assess such a circumstance by having Benjamin Paul and Juan Rosales both work in San Pedro la Laguna (see Redfield to Tax, 8 December 1940). Although for reasons described in the letters their "experiment" was never completed, they engaged questions about the tentativeness of ethnographic representation and authenticity via thoughtful reflexive action.10 How does an anthropologist know that the information he or she gets from informants in the field is "good data?" Have anthropologists until recently, as Rabinow (1977:45) suggests, simply thought that the 26 Introduction informant is "always right?" Throughout these letters Redfield and Tax have a considerable amount of discussion about informants. Some of this discussion describes the pragmatics of identifying informants and the circumstances in which research interviews were conducted. Some discussion describes the characteristics of good or bad informants—for example, Tax to Redfield, 24 December 1934: "I hired a mozo to round up Indians from different places—one or two at a time—to come and talk to me. ... It is true that I had some extremely stupid informants. . . . The men were sometimes very shy, and twice they dashed out and away before I could put them at their ease; it probably would have been a bit better had I come to their homes instead of they to ours. ..." And they consider the importance of using multiple informants in order to guard against taking idiosyncratic reports as the norm—"I am getting another informant-interpreter next week to replace Tomas, since I want to start on another canton and also I want to be sure that I'm not too much influenced by seeing things through the eyes of one interpreter-guide. Before I finish here I intend that I shall have used all of the intelligent young men of the tribe in this capacity. . . ." (Tax to Redfield, 26 February 1935).11 In conducting fieldwork, what are the relative merits of focusing on "objective"—material and behavioral—aspects versus ideational aspects of community life? Recently, Redfield and Tax are faulted for being naive realists because their conception of culture "never became exclusively ideational" (Hawkins 1983:300). Moreover, the critique argues that "Tax thus follows Redfield in characterizing the Indians by traits. Neither Redfield nor Tax sought for the meaning of the traits by considering them as a system of relations to each other that cross both community and ethnic boundaries" (Hawkins 1983:306). This characterization of Redfield and Tax as seeing only well- bounded groups sharing homogeneous sets of traits bears little relation to the picture that emerges from their letters. Rather, their correspondence has many discussions of heterogeneity within and among communities. In these discussions, Redfield and Tax struggle not to force the appearance of homogeneity, but to come to terms with anomalous information within a conceptual framework that treats such diversity as an important source of information rather than as a problem to be "resolved." As much of this discussion focuses on ideational aspects of Guatemalan social life as it does on the observable behavioral and material aspects. It is clear from these letters that these ideational aspects of social life were the major preoccupation of Redfield and Tax. It emerges that Penny Capitalism, the only book-length study of Guatemala published by Tax, which describes the material and economic basis of Panajachel society, was undertaken as a peripheral Introduction 27

project.12 Tax introduced the term "World View" to American anthropology based on this Guatemalan fieldwork (Mendelson 1968:577). In their letters Redfield and Tax discuss not only the integration of ideational and "objective" evidence in ethnography, but also the need to combine intensive participant observation with extensive surveys. From these discussions we have the opportunity to see the considerations that go into selecting where and how to carry out ethnography. They chose units of analysis as appropriate for the problem at hand and changed them depending upon the question they were exploring. Rather than failing to see that the municipios they often used as their unit of analysis were integrally linked to regional and national structures (Early 1983:75), Tax and Redfield went to great lengths to find the proper balance between local-level and more macro-level analyses. And they acknowledged the need to move freely between these levels as the problem they are investigating requires (Tax 1953:ix-x).13 This correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax can profitably be read from many perspectives. An interested reader can explore the epistemological and practical aspects of anthropology around which many of our discipline's most compelling discussions are today taking place. But first, perhaps, we can read these letters for the pleasure of the opportunity to witness the human exchange between Robert Redfield and Sol Tax, and to share their sense of excitement and fascination in doing anthropological fieldwork with the peoples of Guatemala. From whatever perspective and for whatever purpose these letters are read, I hope others will share the enormous enjoyment and satisfaction I've gotten from working with them.

Notes

1. There are several very helpful discussions of anthropology during this period (see Stocking 1976, Kehoe 1985, Frantz 1985, Ebihara 1985, and Kelly 1985) of Robert Redfield's contributions to social science (see Leslie 1968, 1976, Hansen 1976, Murra 1976, Singer 1958), and of Tax's career (Tax 1988, Hinshaw 1979a, 1979b, Rubinstein 1986, in press), which can be consulted for more information about these topics. 2. Reflection describes those instances when we look back on our experiences in order to form an image of our earlier work. It is a process which involves the construction and management of self-images. Reflexivity, in contrast, requires the active analysis and application of our experience to improve our data collection and interpretation. Reflexivity necessarily involves the critical examination and use of earlier experience to influence future action, and is thus an epistemologically revitalizing activity. 28 Introduction

3. Methodolatry results from a scientism in which "the social sciences have tended to rely on the development of highly sophisticated 'scientific' methods to escape the existential determinants readily seen as controlling the subjects whom they study" (HufFord 1985:181). For analyses of scientism and its effects, both theoretical and practical, on the social sciences see HufFord (1982a, 1982b, 1983, 1985) and Rubinstein (1984, 1989, Rubinstein et al. 1984). 4. I follow recent discussions in identifying a "postmodernist" trend in anthropology (Sangren 1988, Mascia-Lees 1989, and Roth 1989). The coherence of, and diversity within, this trend are well represented by the contributions to Clifford and Marcus (1986). David Maines (personal communication) points out that calling this body of work postmodernist is misleading; only some of it "presumes the lack of any central unity in a society or culture." The anthropological work which does not share this core assumption might, Maines (1989) suggests, alternatively be identified as belonging to a post-positivist, interpretive frame. Whether it shares the core concerns of postmodernism or simply extends the interpretive paradigm, much of this literature substitutes the idiosyncratic interpretation of our professional and personal anthropological experiences for the examination of epistemological issues in anthropology from the perspective of our discipline as a collective enterprise. It is to such discussions that my comments apply. I do not mean to include in this group work which correctly contends that meaning is enacted and communicated, or that anthropological writing is always in part rhetorical. 5. A similar story is told of Kroeber, who is said to have responded to a request for advice about fieldwork by saying, "I suggest you buy a notebook and a pencil." Agar (1980:2) changes this "Berkeley folklore" into "historical fact," and then cites it as evidence of the lack of rigor in methodological training in anthropology. Similarly, Ward and Werner (1984:107) relate Carl Vogelin's report that his total field training involved Kroeber telling him to "get a Model T and a cast iron frying pan." They then use this report to make the point that "Field methods as an important intellectual problem were neglected." In their descriptions of the historically poor state of methodological training in anthropology, contemporary methodologists willingly accept the veracity of oral reports to the exclusion of observational data. Since anthropologists are keenly aware that what people say they do often varies from what they really do, this selective methodological preference is interesting. Following Latour (1987:25), it is important to explore how it is that statements like "Methodolodical training in anthropology was neglected" have come to be considered "closed, obvious, firm and packaged premise[s] leading to some other less closed, less obvious, less firm and less united consequence." In looking at the issue from the perspective of how the status of such statements changes from problematic to established, we see "why it is solid or weak instead of using it to to render some other consequences more necessary" (Latour 1987:23). 6. This tendency to put complex questions in terms of simple, clear-cut statements reflects a general trend in contemporary social science which is Introduction 29 intolerant of ambiguity and treats recognition of it as problematic (Levine 1985). 7. For evidence that Tax shared this commitment to pluralism in theory and method see Tax (1988) and Rubinstein (1986:274). 8. There are other points in the book that seem disingenuous as well. Among them are Rabinow's portrait of himself as a lone ethnographer making his way without guidance through fieldwork (when in the introduction he tells us he was a member of a five-person research team, which included his graduate advisor). Also troubling is his insistence that meaning emerges dialectically in fieldwork while employing this lesson only as it corresponds with the image of himself which he seeks to construct in the book. Thus, he "discovers" that he had been "mistakenly" instructed at Chicago about how informants are always right and what to expect of "social facts" (Rabinow 1977:121). He also discovers how easy it is for an anthropologist to misconstrue meaning during cross-cultural communication. At one point he describes the essential dialectic process involved in finding that his refusal to pay for his key informant's expenses during a trip to Marrakech was culturally appropriate, even wise, revealing that after more than a month of close interaction his "typification" of their relationship had been mistaken (Rabinow 1977:28-29). Yet, later, the construction of meaning via the fieldwork dialectic is apparently unnecessary in order to understand the cultural context of his informant's sensual activities and his own sexual relations with a local woman, because after a brief meeting clearly everyone "knew the score" (Rabinow 1977:64-69). 9. Reflexivity in this sense is a hallmark of competence in all professions (Schon 1983). Moreover, such learning from experience is key to improving research practice and developing new, more adequate frames of reference (Argyris 1980, Argyris, Putnam and Smith 1985). 10. The construction of a controlled comparison of native and non-native ethnographic reporting is a more usefully reflexive response to the issues of authority and representation in ethnography than many of the "sophisticated" postmodernist discussions of ethnography as literature, which sometimes, as Stanley Tambiah says, seem to be "navel watching" (see Wilford 1990:16). Redfield's and Tax's experiment also anticipates Campbell's (1970:71) call for just such a validation of ethnographic knowledge. 11. This apparently simple procedure anticipates the development by those formally interested in methodological issues of the "method of convergent validation" which, in part, requires the use of reports from multiple observers in order to filter out systematic distortions from idiosyncratic reports (see, for instance, Campbell 1970:70). 12. My own reading of Redfield's and Tax's published accounts of their Mesoamerican fieldwork suggests that those who argue that Redfield and Tax were overly concerned with objects and social facts, with culture traits and material culture, and that they paid too little attention to the symbolic and ideational aspects of society (e.g., Tedlock 1983:238, Hawkins 1983:302,306, 1984) are mistaken. For example in the Preface to Penny Capitalism, Tax 30 Introduction

(1953:ix-x) emphasizes the importance of cross-community interaction and of the need to describe the ideational aspects of Panajachel, the community about which he writes. Tax outlines his intentions to pursue just such a reporting as an integrated text with Penny Capitalism. Further, Tax invites interested readers to review his field materials about the ideational aspects of Panajachel which then were indexed and available in many libraries on microfilm. It also seems somewhat disingenuous for Hawkins to fault Redfield and Tax merely because they sought a unit of analysis with which to deal. It is impossible—even for Hawkins—to make an analysis without constructing some unit as appropriate for the problem at hand (Schon 1983). 13. In the introduction to Penny Capitalism Tax notes that he has in mind two other books focusing on the non-material aspects of Panajachel society. These were never published, but his Practical Animism: The World of Panajachel was in press when he withdrew it to await the results of a restudy. It is available in the University of Chicago Microfilm Collection of Manuscripts on Middle American Cultural Anthropology.

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