American ethnologists are currently discovering a type of man and a “culture.” Their attention had been focussed for a long while on the various Indian tribes as a favored field of investigation, and, more recently, on the inhabitants of large or middle-sized American cities. This scientific “isolationism” had, therefore, effectively hidden from them the condition of the two-thirds of humanity who are neither “primitives” nor city-dwellers but, rather, peasants.

Robert Redfield, whose first inquiries took him to Mexico, there encountered what he called “folk culture.” Dispersed about the globe, his students brought back studies which led him to think that “peasant society and culture have a generic quality. This species of human organization has a certain uniformity throughout the world.” Studying the life of Polish, Chinese, European, Latin-American, and Hindu peasants, he noted what he calls “this imperturbable sameness.”