Edward Spicer, who had been University of Arizona Dean Byron Cummings’ student and assistant in archaeological projects, shifted to social anthropology as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago of Robert Redfield and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Rosamond Brown, a fellow graduate student took notes for him while he was hospitalized for tuberculosis. They were married in June 1936 and began a year’s fieldwork at the Yaqui (Yoeme) village of Pascua (then) on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. His Ph.D. dissertation, a functionalist community study focusing on cultural persistence (of uprooted Yaquis at the edges of an American city) and “fictive kinship,” and her M.A. thesis on the Pascua Easter ceremony emerged from this fieldwork.
His study of Pascua was published by the University of Chicago Press as part of a quasi-series of community studies, with Redfield’s own books, John Embree’s Japanese village study, and the Québec studies of Horace Miner and Everett Hughes. (Hughes was Redfield’s classmate in the then-joint sociology and anthropology department at Chicago; the others were students of Redfield and Radcliffe-Brown. Redfield wrote prefaces to Miner's and Spicer's; Radcliffe-Brown to Embree's.).
Pascua was like Chan Kom (and unlike Tepoztlán, the other community reported on by Redfield in a book-length study) in being a new settlement and with considerable influences by American culture and in being composed of "Indians" (i.e., not mestizo Mexicans of whom there are and were many on Tucscon's west dide). Although ignoring relations of Pascua and Pascolas with the Tucson, Arizona, and United State government, Spicer explicitly addressed factionalism. “We Yaquis [in Pascua] are not all from one pueblo; how, then, can we form one pueblo here?” Spicer quoted as a common saying in Pascua. Diverse points of origin (and the “wild” versus “tame” histories of those places of origin in relation to the Mexican government) are what Spicer stressed. He argued that there was “little correlation between property possessed and village participation,” that there was an” absence of class groupings based on income or property possessed,” and that Pascolas did not consider “economic values” important (as did the “surrounding community” of Anglo- and Mexican-Americans). “Prestige in the village depends much more on ceremonial activity than it does on income or possessions of property,” Spicer asserted (echoing Redfield’s representation of the Yucatán Maya village of Chan Kom that Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas studied).
Whereas Pascua was ethnic enclave of ex-peasants on the margins of a then-small American city, the Spicers went on to do fieldwork in the Mexican Yaqui village of Potam, Sonora. The fieldwork was done in 1941-42 although the results were not published until 1954. Spicer’s primary focus was on “exotic” religious beliefs and practices, with an explicit functionalist (in the Radcliffe-Brown style) argument for “the consistency and interdependence of the behaviors and beliefs which characterize Yaquis” (2), the “close linkages of most aspects of Yaqui culture.” Although never focusing on class (or incipient class) differences between twentieth-century Yaqui, Spicer’s magisterial 1980 “cultural history” of the Yaquis included three pages discussing (albeit minimizing) differentiation among nineteenth-century Yaquis, and pointing out that the Yaqui (in Mexico) were not peasants then.
The 1940 book abstracts observations into generalizations about the community. Another book focused on individuals of Pascua, People of Pascua based on life history interviews in the late-1930s was held back until they and Edward Spicer were dead, in 1988. Obviously, this later book is closer to the lived experiences of the Pascua residents (but less "experience-near" in its greater remove from the time of data collection.) Although it was readied for publication by Rosamond Spicer, it was bylined "Edward Spicer" as their other collaborative studies had been during his lifetime. (I conducted a very long interview with Rosamond Spicer after People of Pascua and could not elicit any resentment at not receiving much public credit for her contributions. She published some things under her own name, including her M.A. thesis.)
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Drawn from a long manuscript I'm writing, "American anthropologists discover peasants," this is the second discussion of one of the classic community studies from the University of Chicago floresence of community studies done before Word War II. The first dealt with the long-delayed publication of a study of a central Sicilian village, Milloca by Charlotte Gower Chapman (Redfield's classmate rather than his student as the Spicers were).
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