The ethnographic moment

"The first fifty years of the twentieth century were a time of ferment in American anthropology. American ethnographic work evolved from the "salvage" work of professionals affiliated with museums who undertook to document with artifacts and testimony the threatened traditional way of life among the Native American tribes, to the establishment of anthropology as a science, represented in university departments, that sought to describe the "ethnographic present" of isolated primitive peoples, often in distant parts of the world. By the beginning of the 1950s, cultural anthropology discovered the peasant. Robert Redfield, himself a leading figure in this paradigm shift, challenged anthropology's focus on a static model of the isolated primitive community, pointing out the dynamic nature of the "little communities" he studied in Mesoamerica. These were not isolated communities, but rather local, traditional cultures located well within the sphere of a complex urban culture. In order to distinguish the "great tradition" deriving from urban centers from the "little tradition" of a more primitive culture, Redfield believed anthropology needed to refer to other disciplines, such as theolo