ANTHROPOLOGY COMES PART-WAY HOME: COMMUNITY STUDIES IN EUROPE

Abstract

Robert Redfield's research in the Mexican village of Tepoztlan in the late 1920s marks the expansion of field research in social anthropology into complex societies. Certainly in the decades which followed this work there was a proliferation of research among peasants, pastoralists and fishermen. Anthropologists conducted field work not only in Latin America, but in the civilizations of Asia and Africa as well. In this general expansion, a few studies were conducted in Europe in the late 1920s and 1930s, notably by Arensberg in Western Ireland (5, 6), by Chapman in Sicily (30), and by Sanders (97) in the Balkans. But the cultures of contemporary Europe held little interest for the profession at large. I As a number of writers have noted, little social anthropological research was carried out in Europe until the 1950s (2, pp. 2-3; 5, pp. 9-13; 56, p. 743). This was certainly not because of a lack of familiarity with the continent. The study of historical sources on the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean and on the Celtic and Germanic tribes of antiquity played a prominent role in the formation of nineteenth century anthropological ideas. As John Davis (38, pp. 1-4; see also 76) has pointed out, Maine, Fustel de Coulanges, Robertson-Smith, Fraser, Durkheim, and Westermark all drew on Mediterranean sources in formulating their comparative and theoretical schemes, and Maine especially made much use of material on the Irish Celts. Morgan drew on all of these societies in his evolutionary formulations, and anchored his work in classic Greece and Rome. Marx and Engels used the ancient civilizations as a kind of watershed. Writings which focus on the processes that led to the formation of capitalism began with these slave-based