A Maya Village: The Folk-Urban Continuum Essay

The household-urban continuum model elaborated by Robert Redfield continues to reappear from time to time in various guises. The concept of the continuum has been attacked as being simplistic, and overgeneralized, not least because umpteen geographers have detected village-type communities within large cities.Redfields speculations about what he saw as the significant changes from the folk to the urban end of the continuum ar based on studies conducted in the Yucatan during the early 1930s. Its essential elements management on the fact that as a residential area moves from the folk to the urban end of the continuum, there occur shifts from cultural intimacy and organization to disorganization. along with this there is collective or community orientation to individualization and the unspeakable to the secular.Folk cultures are borne by small, closely-integrated social units or by aggregates of such(prenominal) units which have already worked out satisfactory mutual adjustments. Redfield characterized the folk societies he had been perusing as traditional, spontaneous, and uncritical where men follow similar lifestyles. These patterns persist clear throughout the generations. In sum, the folk society holds its traditions to heart and doesnt question their way of life. These lifestyles are practically sacred. In raw civilization, on the other hand, the small social units are being broken d give, bragging(a) place to masses of individuals who are much more loosely relate than the members of the former local groups and classes. In modern civilizations, culture is being reduced. Our own civilization is simply a blend of differences which he must choose.The concepts of folk religion and folk beliefat least when filtered through Redfields categoriesare descriptive anthropological categories meant to aid in the attempt to regard the conditions and development of certain kinds of society. In part, Redfields concept of folk or peasant culture wasmeant to provi de an alternative to the division of societies into indigenous 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 immediate culture, and the peasant community and its culture, where the context is widened to include the elements of the great traditions that are or have been in interaction with what is local and immediate. Folk beliefs referred to a body of belief and radiation pattern forming part of a communitys local knowledge. As a result, they tended to occupy a region close to the cosmology and common genius of the group, rather than the domain occupied by a consciously judge creed.Redfield wants to manifestation at cultural change, in the ways that varying degrees of see with civilization differentially affects folk culture throughout the Yucatan. The Chan Kom study was the jump step in a project funded by the Carnegie Institution to look at the question of cultur e change. The project was to begin by studying a community where folk culture was complete. This is Chan Kom. Then, for comparison, the study was to go on to look at communities where that culture is in disorganization or conversion into something else. Eventually, this project would encompass four towns and would place them in a folk-urban continuum.