A Maya Village: The Folk-Urban Continuum Essay

The kins class-urban continuum model elaborated by Robert Redfield continues to reappear from time to time in various guises. The impression of the continuum has been attacked as being simplistic, and overgeneralized, not to the lowest degree because many a(prenominal) geographers ease up detected village-type communities within large cities.Redfields speculations about what he saw as the operative changes from the clan to the urban end of the continuum are establish on studies conducted in the Yucatan during the early 1930s. Its intrinsic ele manpowerts focus on the fact that as a community moves from the folk to the urban end of the continuum, there occur shifts from heathen intimacy and organization to disorganization. along with this there is collective or community predilection to individualization and the sacred to the secular.Folk cultures are borne by small, closely-integrated brotherly units or by aggregates of such units which have already worked out satisfactory mutual adjustments. Redfield characterized the folk societies he had been chooseing as traditional, spontaneous, and uncritical where men follow similar lifestyles. These patterns remain clear passim the generations. In sum, the folk society holds its traditions to heart and doesnt apparent movement their way of life. These lifestyles are practically sacred. In red-brick acculturation, on the other hand, the small social units are being broken down, giving side to masses of individuals who are much more in general interrelated than the members of the former local groups and classes. In modern civilizations, culture is being reduced. Our own civilization is but a blend of differences which he must choose.The concepts of folk religion and folk mental pictureat least when filtered through Redfields categoriesare descriptive anthropological categories meant to aid in the attempt to understand the conditions and learning of certain kinds of society. In part, Redfields concept of folk or peasant culture wasmeant to provide an utility(a) to the division of societies into aboriginal and modern categories.The concept relied on a distinction between an isolated primitive community, which has for context only that community and its local and agile culture, and the peasant community and its culture, where the context is widened to include the elements of the large(p) traditions that are or have been in interaction with what is local and immediate. Folk beliefs referred to a body of belief and practice forming part of a communitys local knowledge. As a result, they tended to occupy a region close to the cosmology and common sense datum of the group, rather than the domain occupied by a consciously accepted creed.Redfield wants to look at cultural change, in the ways that varying degrees of contact with civilization differentially affects folk culture throughout the Yucatan. The Chan Kom study was the first step in a vomit funded by the Carnegie Institutio n to look at the question of culture change. The project was to begin by canvass a community where folk culture was carry through. This is Chan Kom. Then, for comparison, the study was to go on to look at communities where that culture is in disorganization or diversity into something else. Eventually, this project would encompass four towns and would place them in a folk-urban continuum.