Every world view distinguishes (a) part of the self from another part, thus establishing, as it were, a dialogue within the self (b) a human nature from that which is nonhuman (c) classes and categories of the human, i.e., social persons (e.g., groupings of persons who are intimate and similar, others who are far and different) and (d) an entity called nature and another described in shorthand as God, within the nonhuman. He hypothesized that there are certain universal elements of world views. Redfield was primarily interested in world views that characterize whole peoples and have been generally developed without the assistance of the specialized philosopher he distinguished these from a “cosmology,” or the systematic reflections of the specialized thinker. Here he clearly emphasized the individual: self is the axis of world view, which is the way a man in a particular society sees himself in relation to everything around him. The first explicit elaboration of the concept occurred in Redfleld’s article “The Primitive World View” (1952). Tax observed that Guatemalan Indians, who do not acculturate to Ladinos or to each other, continue to have a primitive world view, although they appear to have had a “civilized” type of impersonal, market-oriented system of socioeconomic relations since pre-Columbian times. In a seminal paper, “World View and Social Relations in Guatemala,” Sol Tax (1941) distinguished world view from social relations, although he suggested that perception of the latter enters into the “mental apprehension of reality” that is world view. Redfield’s original concern with levels of understanding among individuals who hold diverse world views developed into the study of interactions between high and low, intellectual and lay, urban and village cultures within a great civilization. In its final metamorphosis, influenced by the theories of orientalists, the concept of world view merged with the concept of “Great” and “Little” traditions, which contains a more balanced evolutionary view of the loss of purity. In approaching modern urban culture via the peasant culture which is its rural counterpart, Redfield sought to rediscover the purity of folk culture and, indeed, to reimpose it by a concern with the good life and by an interest in the cause of peace and understanding among nations. This view caused Redfield to stress the positive aspects of the primitive condition and to see any evolution therefrom -in spite of reconstructive attempts-as essentially disruptive and negative. He was impressed by the incurable wound inflicted on the Indian past and, throughout his career, thought of primitive culture as a broken thing, persisting here and there and striving to defend itself. Redfield’s encounter with an Indian culture which was at grips successively with Spanish and modern urban cultures aroused his interest in the evolutionary process and in sociocultural change.
In Redfield’s book The Folk Culture of Yucatan (1941), he expressed an embryonic concern with the concept of world view. The concept of world view is closely tied to an ambitious effort made in the early 1950s by a group of scholars at the University of Chicago, guided by Robert Redfield. Thus, it tends to be confused with such concepts as ethos (relating to values), modes of thought, national character, and even culture itself. While emphasizing the cognitive aspect of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes, a world view cannot be clearly separated from its normative and affective aspects. It stresses the self in confrontation with the universe, although it has so far leaned very little on the personality theories of cultural anthropologists. It attempts to define those ideas from the point of view of the individuals holding them, from inside the culture rather than outside. It deals with the sum of ideas which an individual within a group and/or that group have of the universe in and around them.
World view is one of a number of concepts in cultural anthropology used in the holistic characterization and comparison of cultures.
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