Eric Wolf

He describes his life in the 1920s and 30s in segregated Vienna and then in proletarianizing Czechoslovakia as attuning him early on to questions surrounding class, ethnicity, and political power.

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 Marxist perspectives within anthropology.

Wolf was born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family.

Wolf has described his family as nonreligious, and said that he had little experience of a Jewish community while growing up.

His father worked for a corporation and was also a Freemason.

Wolf described his mother, who had studied medicine in Russia, as a feminist—"not in terms of declarations, but in terms of her stand on human possibilities."

The social divisions in Vienna and conflicts in the region in the 1930s influenced Wolf's later scholarly work.

Wolf and his family moved to England and then to the United States to escape Nazism.

Wolf went to the Forest School, in Walthamstow, Essex, for two years, where he learned English and became interested in science, in part because of the strong emphasis on science of the school's Canadian headmaster.

Despite learning English only when he arrived at the school as a teenager, he won the school's English essay prize.

Moving to England also made him aware of cultural difference in a new way.

In 1933, his father's work moved the family to Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, where Wolf attended German Gymnasium.

In 1940, Wolf was interned in an alien detention camp in Huyton, near Liverpool, England.

The detention camp was a high stress environment.

It was there that Wolf became exposed to the organizational possibilities of socialism and communism.

Through seminars organized by intellectuals in the camp, he was also exposed to the social sciences.

Wolf was especially influenced by the German Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias who was also interned there.

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 Queens College in New York City and also spent a summer at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1941.

Spending time in the South allowed Wolf to see a different side of the United States than he was familiar with from New York.

Soon after, in 1961, Wolf began teaching at the University of Michigan, holding a position as a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Lehman College, CUNY before moving in 1971 to the CUNY Graduate Center, where he spent the remainder of his career.

In addition to his Latin American work, Wolf also did fieldwork in Europe.

With his student, John W. Cole, he conducted fieldwork on the culture, history, and settlement pattern of the Tyrol region, which was later published in their book The Hidden Frontier.

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.

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.

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.

Wolf struggled with colon cancer later in life.

Wolf was in the army and fought overseas in World War II, serving in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division.

After returning from Europe, Wolf finished college at Queens College.

There, Wolf became interested in anthropology, and later went on to study anthropology at Columbia University.

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.