Eric Wolf
Eric Wolf | |
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Born | Eric Robert Wolf 1 February 1923 The Hidden Frontier, Europe and the People Without History |
Spouse | Sydel Silverman |
Children | David Wolf, Daniel Wolf |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Anthropology |
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Anthropology |
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Economic, applied, and development anthropology |
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Social and cultural anthropology |
Eric Robert Wolf (February 1, 1923 – March 6, 1999)
Early life
Life in Vienna
Wolf was born in
Studying and living in other countries
Wolf and his family moved to
Later in 1940, Wolf emigrated to the United States—the same period that 300,000 Jews emigrated to the U.S. from Germany. He enrolled in
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,
Wolf's dissertation research was carried out as part of Steward's 'People of
Wolf's key contributions to anthropology are related to his focus 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 critiquing popular European history for largely ignoring historical actors outside the ruling classes. He also demonstrates that non-Europeans were active participants 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.
In his Distinguished Lecture for the 1989 American Anthropological Association annual meeting, he warned that anthropologists are involved in 'continuously slaying paradigms, only to see them return to life, as if discovered for the first time.' This results in anthropology 'resembling a project in intellectual deforestation.' He argued that anthropology can be cumulative rather than continuous re-invention. Anthropologists, rather than focusing on high-flown theory, should aim for explanatory anthropology focused on the realities of life and fieldwork.[5] Wolf struggled with colon cancer later in life. He died in 1999 in Irvington, New York.
Work and ideas
Disciplinary imperialism
As a social scientist, already fighting from a less than ideal position in the wider academy, Eric Wolf criticized what he called disciplinary imperialism within social sciences, and between social sciences on one hand, and the
Power
Much of Wolf's work deals with issues of power. In his book Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (1999), Wolf deals with the relationship between power and ideas. He distinguishes between four modalities of power: 1. Power inherent in an individual; 2. Power as capacity of ego to impose one's will on alter; 3. Power as control over the contexts in which people interact; 4. Structural power: "By this I mean the power manifest in relationships that not only operates within settings and domains but also organizes and orchestrates the settings themselves, and that specifies the direction and distribution of energy flows". Based on Wolf's previous experience and later studies, he rejects the concept of culture that emerged from the counter-Enlightenment. Instead, he proposes a redefinition of culture that emphasizes power, diversity, ambiguity, contradiction and imperfectly shared meaning and knowledge.[citation needed]
Marxism
Wolf, known for his interest in and contributions to Marxist thought in anthropology, says that Marxism must be understood in the context of kinship and local culture. Culture and power are integrated, and mediated by ideology and property relations. There are two branches of Marxism, as defined by Wolf: Systems Marxism and Promethean Marxism. Systems Marxism is the discipline of postulates that could be used to frame general laws or patterns of social development. Promethean Marxism symbolized optimism for freedom from economic and political mistreatment and renowned reforming as the fashion to a more desirable future.[8]
Activism
Wolf was involved in the protests against the Vietnam War. During his time at the University of Michigan he organized one of the first teach-ins against the war. He also was critical of the close relationship between some anthropologists of Southeast Asia and the US government, and led an ultimately successful attempt to re-write the code of ethics of the American Anthropological Association to prevent anthropological data from knowingly being used in military campaigns.[9]
Personal
Wolf had two children from his first marriage, David and Daniel. Wolf later married the anthropologist Sydel Silverman.[10] in the 1960s his best friend was the anthropologist Robert Burns Jr., father of the documentarian Ken Burns. While Ken Burns's mother was dying, he was cared for by Wolf's family.[11]
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)
- Wrote Introduction and contributing essay in National Liberation: revolution in the third world / Edited by Norman Miller and Roderick Aya (The Free Press, 1971)
- 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)
- "Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power--Old Insights, New Questions", American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp. 586–596.
- Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (University of California Press, 1999)
- Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World (with Sydel Silverman) (University of California Press, 2001)
Notes
- ^ Date information sourced from Library of Congress Authorities data, via corresponding WorldCat Identities linked authority file (LAF).
- ^ a b Prins 2018
- ^ "Wolf, Eric Robert". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org.
- ^ "Eric R. Wolf - Faculty History Project".
- ^ "Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power--Old Insights, New Questions" American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp. 586-596.
- ^ Anthropologies, 2. September, 2011
- ^ Europe And The People Without History
- ISBN 0520 223330. Envisioning.
- ^ Marcus, Anthony (30 November 2001). "Eric R. Wolf, Scholar-Activist". Solidarity. Retrieved 27 February 2019.
- ^ Thomas, Robert (March 10, 1999). "Eric R. Wolf, 76, an Iconoclastic Anthropologist". New York Times. Retrieved 18 September 2017.
- ^ Rosenberg, Allyssa (September 18, 2017). "Unburying the Vietnam War: To tell the true story of the conflict, Lynn Novick and Ken Burns had to revisit old wounds in the United States and Vietnam". Washington Post. Retrieved 18 September 2017.
References
- Patterson, Thomas Carl (2001). A Social History of Anthropology in the United States. Oxford and New York: 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: ISBN 978-0-415-46105-4.
- Prins, Harald E. L. (2018). ""Wolf, Eric." Pp. 6486-90. In International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Vol.12, ed. Hillary Callan". New York: ISBN 978-0-470-65722-5.
- Anthony, Marcus (2003). "Imaginary Worlds. The Last Years of Eric Wolf: Pathways Of Power. Building An Anthropology Of The Modern World. By Eric Wolf. Edited By Sydel Silverman. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2001. 488 Pp. $60.00. Envisioning". Social Anthropology. 11 (1): 113–127. ISBN 0-520-22333-0.
- Wolf, Eric (1982). Europe And The People Without History. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-04898-9.
- (PDF) on 14 November 2012. Retrieved 23 April 2013.
- Barrett, Stanley R.; Sean Stokholm; Jeanette Burke (June 2001). "The Idea of Power and the Power of Ideas: A Review Essay". American Anthropologist. 103 (2): 468-4802. JSTOR 683477.
External links
- Media related to Eric R. Wolf at Wikimedia Commons
- Quotations related to Eric Wolf at Wikiquote
- from Richard Wilk's website, a short biography of Wolf Archived 2017-05-07 at the Wayback Machine
- CUNY Graduate Center Academic Commons Anthropology Homepage
- Conrad Phillip Kottak, "Eric Robert Wolf", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2012)