Chan Kom: A Maya Village:
The Folk-Urban Continuum
The "folk-urban continuum" model elaborated by Robert Redfield continues to reappear from time to time in various guises. The concept of the continuum has been attacked as being simplistic, and overgeneralized, not least because many geographers have detected village-type communities within large cities.
Redfield's speculations about what he saw as the significant changes from the folk to the urban end of the continuum are based on studies conducted in the Yucatan during the early 1930s. …