Eric Wolf
Eric Robert Wolf (born February 1, 1923 in Vienna, Austria; died March 6, 1999) was an American anthropologist, best known for his studies of Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology.
Life
Wolf was born in Vienna, but to avoid persecution his Jewish family moved first to England and then in 1940 to United States, and Wolf was raised largely in New York. He initially enrolled in Queens College, but had to halt his studies due to the World War II. He married on September 24, 1943 to Kathleen Bakeman, a social worker. Later he joined army and went to fight overseas. It is probably there that Wolf developed a deep interest for other cultures. After the war ended, like many returning soldiers he took advantage of the newly minted GI Bill of Rights to get a college education. Wolf began studying anthropology at Columbia University. He earned his Bachelors Degree in Sociology and Anthropology in 1946, and his PhD in 1951. His professors were Ruth Benedict and Julian Steward.
Columbia had been the home of Franz Boas 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 L. Kroeber. Steward was interested in creating a scientific anthropology, which explained how societies evolved and adapted to their physical environment.
Wolf was part of the clique of students formed 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 Marvin Harris, Sidney Mintz, Morton Fried, Stanley Diamond, and Robert F. Murphy were among this group.
Wolf joined Steward in his field study in Puerto Rico in 1949 where he first became interested in peasants, power struggle, and political economy. He visited Mexico three times from 1951 until 1956 studying about formation of Mexican national identity. He went to Europe in 1960 for fieldwork in the Italian Alps.
Wolf taught at University of Illinois from 1952 until 1955, at University of Virginia from 1955 until 1958, at Yale from 1958 till 1959, at University of Chicago from 1959 till 1960, at the University of Michigan from 1961 until 1971, and at the CUNY for the rest of his career..
Wolf divorced his wife in 1972, and married Sydel Silverman, an anthropologist.
Wolf struggled with cancer later in life, and died in 1999.
Work
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 ideas can be characterized as Marxist in nature. He studied about power struggle of peasants against capitalist elite, and the influence of capitalism on cultural identity of local communities. Looking through those lenses Wolf approached anthropology.
Wolf was against idea of society as bounded entity. That came from his experience with peasants. Wolf saw that local communities are not isolated on the local level, but that they are functional part of a larger society. Therefore, to understand any local community one has to observe it within the complex system of political, economical, cultural, and other relationships. In addition, one has to approach society from the historical perspective, seeing it in a historical context, within a larger community. No society is isolated in time and space, but it interacts with other societies across boundaries and across time. Thus in his book Europe and the People Without History” Wolf writes about different tribes, bands, and small states in the world that were developing within the bigger system of capitalists expansion around the globe. In the book Wolf writes about non-Europeans being caught up in global processes like the fur trade and slave trades. Thus they were not 'frozen in time' or 'isolated', but had always been deeply implicated in world history. Colonialism had great influence on local communities.
- ”Cultures are not integral wholes carried by social isolates. We must distinguish between reality culture and ideology-making, and recognize that the creation or dismantling of cultures always goes on within extensive social fields, structured by the dominant modes of production. It is suggested that ideology-making derives from the prevalent mode of production and is entailed in its operations”. (Wolf, 1984, 393).
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.
Legacy
Wolf’s contribution to anthropological science is on two levels. First level is a time level. He saw society in a historical context, not as static but a dynamic entity, always in the process of changing. That change is caused not only because of internal dynamics within the society, but also due to interaction of the society beyond its boundaries. This is the second level. Wolf saw society within the larger picture of global processes and interactions, where all societies are interconnected on the world level. In Wolf’s case, the common denominator that tied all societies was capitalism.
Bibliography
- Wolf, Eric R. (1951). Culture Change and Culture Stability in a Puerto Rican Coffee Community. Ph. D. Dissertation, Columbia University, New York.
- Wolf, Eric R. (1969/1999). Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0806131969
- Wolf, Eric R. (1974). Anthropology. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393092909
- Wolf, Eric R. (1982). Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press. ISBN 0520048989
- Wolf, Eric R. (1984). Culture: Panacea or Problem? American Antiquity, 49, 2, 393-400.
- Wolf, Eric R. (1988). Inventing Society. American Ethnologist, 15, 752-61
- Wolf, Eric R. (1994). Perilous Ideas: Race, Culture, People. Current Anthropology, 35, 1, 1-12.
- Wolf, Eric R. (1999). Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. University of California Press. ISBN 0520215826
- Wolf, Eric R. (2001). Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World. University of California Press. ISBN 0520223349
- Wolf, Eric R., & Hansen, Edward, C. (1972). The Human Condition in Latin America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 019501569X
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