Eric Wolf

Eric Robert Wolf (February 1, 1923 – March 6, 1999) was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology.

Early life

Wolf was born in Vienna, but his Jewish family moved first to England and then America to avoid persecution, and Wolf was raised largely in New York. He fought overseas in WWII and saw action in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division. Like many returning soldiers he took advantage of the newly-minted G.I. Bill to get a college education and developed an interest in other cultures. Wolf began studying anthropology at Columbia University.

Career

Columbia had been the home of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict for many years, and was the central location for the spread of anthropology in America. By the time Wolf had arrived Boas had died and his anthropological style, which was suspicious of generalization and preferred detailed studies of particular subjects, was also out of fashion. The new chair of the anthropology department was Julian Steward, a student of Robert Lowie and Alfred Kroeber. Steward was interested in creating a scientific anthropology which explained how societies evolved and adapted to their physical environment.

Wolf was one of the coterie of students who developed around Steward. Older students' leftist beliefs, Marxist in orientation, worked well with Steward's less politicized evolutionism. Many anthropologists prominent in the 1980s such as Sidney Mintz, Morton Fried, Elman Service, Stanley Diamond, and Robert F. Murphy were among this group.

Wolf's dissertation research was carried out as part of Steward's 'People of Puerto Rico' project. Soon after, Wolf began teaching at the University of Michigan. He held a joint position as a Distinguished Professor at both Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center beginning in 1971, where he spent the remainder of his career. In addition to his Latin American work, Wolf also did fieldwork in Europe.

Wolf's relevance to anthropology lies in the fact that he focused on issues of power, politics, and colonialism during the 1970s and 1980s when these topics were moving to the center of disciplinary concerns. His most well-known book, Europe and the People Without History, is famous for unveiling the fact that popular European history largely ignores as being attention-worthy citizens other than monarchs or members of the ruling classes. It also demonstrates that non-Europeans were caught up in global processes like the fur and slave trades and so were not 'frozen in time' or 'isolated' but had always been deeply implicated in world history.

Towards the end of his life he warned of the 'intellectual deforestation' that occurred when anthropology focused on high-flown theory instead of sticking to the realities of life and fieldwork. Wolf struggled with cancer later in life, and died in 1999.

Published works

• The Mexican Bajío in the 18th Century (Tulane University, Middle American Research Institute, 1955)
• Sons of the Shaking Earth (University of Chicago Press, 1959)
• Anthropology (Prentice-Hall, 1964)
• Peasants (Prentice-Hall, 1966)
• Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (Harper & Row, 1969)
• The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (with John W. Cole) (Academic Press, 1974)
• Europe and the People Without History (University of California Press, 1982)
• Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Power (University of California Press, 1999)
• Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World (with Sydel Silverman) (University of California Press, 2001)

References

• Patterson, Thomas Carl (2001). A Social History of Anthropology in the United States. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. ISBN 1-85973-489-8. OCLC 48551832. 
• Prins, Harald E. L. (2010). ""Eric R. Wolf." Pp. 260- 66. In Fifty Key Anthropologists, eds. R. Gordon, H. Lyons, and A. Lyons.". London and New York: Routledge. ISBN -078-0-415-46105-4. 

External links

• Works by or about Eric Wolf in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Instructive introduction to Eric Wolf`s book Europe and the People Without History - free online text
• from Richard Wilk's website, a short biography of Wolf