Anthropology of City: Redfield’s Civilisational Perspective on Urban Modernity

Walk through Varanasi’s ghats at dawn and you will see priests chanting verses that are centuries old, right next to college students scrolling on their phones before an exam. Cities like this force a question that anthropologists have wrestled with for decades: does modernity replace tradition, or does it grow out of it? Robert Redfield, one of the most influential figures in urban anthropology, argued firmly for the second answer. His civilisational perspective on cities remains one of the most useful frameworks for understanding how Indian urban spaces hold tradition and change together, rather than treating them as opposites.

Rethinking the city as a civilisational space 🔗

Most economists and sociologists of the mid-twentieth century saw cities primarily as engines of industry and trade. Redfield took a different route. He treated the city as a civilisational space, a place where a society’s ideas about art, philosophy, religion, and social order get worked out and refined. For him, urbanisation was not just about factories and markets; it was about how a civilisation organises and transmits its own traditions.

This put Redfield at odds with modernisation theorists of his time, who generally treated tradition as a drag on progress, something societies had to shed to become modern. Redfield disagreed. He argued that modern ideas frequently emerge from within religious and cultural traditions rather than in opposition to them, and that tradition does not automatically block development. This was a significant departure, and it aligned him with the broader anthropological commitment to cultural relativism, the idea that a society’s practices should be understood on their own terms rather than measured against a single Western yardstick of progress.

Great and Little Traditions 🔗

The backbone of Redfield’s framework is his distinction between the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition. He described civilisation itself as a structure made up of these two interacting levels, and the concept has since become a standard tool in the anthropological study of Indian civilisation.

The Great Tradition 🔗

The Great Tradition refers to the formal, literate, and reflective culture of a civilisation. It is carried by a relatively small, educated elite, such as priests, scholars, and philosophers, and it is transmitted through organised institutions like temples, seminaries, and universities. In the Indian context, this would include the Sanskritic corpus of the Vedas, Puranas, and classical texts, along with codified systems of law, ritual, and aesthetics.

The Little Tradition 🔗

The Little Tradition, by contrast, is the unrefined, everyday culture of ordinary rural and folk populations. Its carriers are largely non-literate, and its knowledge passes down through oral storytelling, local rituals, folk songs, and customary practice rather than written texts. Redfield did not treat this as an inferior or incomplete version of the Great Tradition. It is a full cultural system in its own right, just organised differently.

Cultural brokers bridging the two 🔗

What keeps these two levels from drifting apart entirely is a group Redfield called cultural specialists, often referred to as cultural brokers. Building on this idea, the anthropologist Milton Singer, who collaborated closely with Redfield on Indian civilisational studies, showed how figures such as priests, storytellers, and ritual performers actively carry elements of the Great Tradition down to village audiences, and carry local practices back up into more formalised religious life. Singer described this exchange happening through what he called cultural performances, events like festivals, recitations, and religious ceremonies, which function as the visible occasions where the Great and Little Traditions actually meet and interact.

Orthogenetic and heterogenetic change 🔗

Redfield’s second major contribution was distinguishing between two kinds of change that cities generate. He and Singer later refined this further in their influential essay on the cultural role of cities.

Orthogenetic cities: carrying tradition forward 🔗

An orthogenetic city is one whose main cultural role is to codify, elaborate, and safeguard a society’s existing traditions. In such cities, a cadre of literate specialists systematises the Great Tradition, turning diffuse folk beliefs into formal religion, law, or philosophy. According to this framework, cities such as Delhi and other capitals of classic empires historically performed this function of elaborating and protecting cultural tradition rather than overturning it. Older studies of Indian cities often point to Benares (Varanasi) as a classic example of an orthogenetic centre, where religious and philosophical traditions are continuously reintegrated rather than replaced.

Heterogenetic cities: generating something new 🔗

A heterogenetic city, on the other hand, is a centre where local cultures come apart and new combinations of ideas and social life take shape. These are typically cities shaped heavily by trade, industry, colonial administration, or migration, where diverse populations mix and older cultural patterns get reworked into something unfamiliar. Redfield described this as a process in which local cultures are disintegrated and new integrations of mind and society are developed. Port cities and colonial-era commercial hubs in India, shaped by successive waves of external contact, are often discussed in this light.

Importantly, Redfield did not see these as rigid categories. Most real cities show a mix of both tendencies at once, elaborating some traditions while also generating genuinely new cultural forms through outside contact. Once a change takes hold in a city, whether through trade, technology, or new ideas, it tends to spread outward, gradually reshaping the surrounding folk societies until parts of them become more urban in character.

Civilisation as multi-centric 🔗

One of the more distinctive parts of Redfield’s argument is that a civilisation is not organised around a single dominant city. Instead, he viewed civilisations as multi-centric, meaning several urban centres each specialise in and contribute to different domains, one might anchor political authority, another aesthetic or artistic excellence, another religious philosophy, and so on. No single city carries the entire weight of a civilisation’s identity.

These centres interact with each other and with cities from other civilisations, and it is through this exchange of ideas that each civilisation develops according to its own worldview and values. This is really the heart of Redfield’s civilisational perspective: modernity is not one fixed destination that every society reaches by following the same road. Different civilisations take different paths toward modern life, shaped by their own traditions, while still retaining a recognisable cultural distinctiveness. Applied to India, this helps explain why urban development here has never simply mirrored Western industrial cities. Indian cities have modernised while continuing to sustain deeply rooted religious institutions, caste-linked occupational networks, and regional artistic traditions, often within the very same urban neighbourhood.

Why this framework still matters 🔗

Redfield wrote at a time when much of Western social science assumed that traditional societies had to abandon their customs to industrialise successfully. His civilisational approach offered a genuine alternative to this model, one that took non-Western civilisations seriously as sources of their own modern development rather than as societies simply catching up to the West. The framework’s later application to India by Milton Singer, who spent extended periods conducting fieldwork on the interaction of little and great traditions in cities such as Madras, demonstrated how a deeply traditional Hindu urban centre could modernise economically without simply discarding its religious and social fabric.

Scholars have also pushed back on parts of this model. Some argue that treating traditions as neatly divided into “Great” and “Little” levels can understate how much power and inequality shape who gets to define a civilisation’s dominant culture, and whose practices get absorbed, sidelined, or reframed in the process. This kind of critique is worth holding alongside Redfield’s original framework rather than instead of it.

Even with these critiques, the core insight holds up well when applied to Indian cities today. A city like Chennai or Kolkata is simultaneously home to institutions codifying classical dance, music, and religious philosophy, and to entirely new hybrid cultural forms produced by migration, media, and global commerce. Redfield’s vocabulary, orthogenetic elaboration alongside heterogenetic disruption, gives us a precise way to talk about both processes happening in the same urban space at once, rather than assuming one must eventually replace the other.

What do you think? Can you think of an Indian city near you that seems to function more as an orthogenetic centre, actively preserving and elaborating tradition, versus one that feels more heterogenetic, constantly generating new cultural mixes? And do you agree with Redfield that traditions can drive modernisation rather than obstruct it, or does that idea sit uneasily with what you have observed around you?

References

1. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp10/chapter/culture-and-civilization-robert-redfield/
2. https://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/epgpdata/uploads/epgp_content/s000001an/p001113/m013437/et/145758515713et.pdf
3. https://kids.britannica.com/scholars/article/urban-culture/109859
4. http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.com/2021/05/urbanisation.html
5. https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/social-sciences-and-law/anthropology-biographies/robert-redfield
6. https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/southasia/singer-red.html