Background

Eric Robert Wolf was born on February 1, 1923, in Vienna, Austria. He was the son of Arthur George and Maria (Ossinovski) Wolf.

Education

In 1940, Wolf enrolled at Queens College, where he planned to study biochemistry. That plan changed when an early anthropology course exposed him to a field that encompassed his interests in culture, history, ethnicity, and the gamut of human experience. His mentor at Queens was Hortense Powdermaker.

During World War II, Wolf deferred his college education for three years to serve with the U.S. Army in the Italian Alps, where he would later return for anthropological fieldwork in 1960.

Returning from combat duty, Wolf resumed his studies at Queens. He received his undergraduate degree from the Department of Anthropology and Sociology in the spring of 1946.

Later that year, financed by the G.I. Bill, he entered graduate school in anthropology at Columbia University, from which he received his doctorate in 1951. At Columbia Wolf entered a department still strongly influenced by the legacy of its founder, Franz Boas. Ruth Benedict, a Boas student, was one of Wolf ’s teachers.

Wolf was part of a study group that called itself the “Mundial Upheaval Society” with Fried, Service, Diamond, Mintz, Robert Manners, and Daniel McCall as he planned his dissertation research (1948-1949), under Steward’s direction, in a coffee-growing community in the highlands of Puerto Rico. That dissertation expressed Wolf’s lifelong interests in peasants, power, class, and patron-client relationships.

In 1992, he received an honorary Double degree from the University of Michigan, also he received his honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Vienna, in 1993, an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam, in 1997.

Career

After receiving his doctorate, Wolf began research in Mexico (1951-1952, 1954, and 1956), where he studied not only peasants but also the formation of national identity, writing an important article on the Virgin of Guadalupe as a key national symbol (1958).

In 1952 Wolf accompanied his graduate mentor, Steward, in his move from Columbia to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where Steward would remain for the rest of his academic career. Wolf taught anthropology and worked with Steward at Illinois from 1952 to 1955, and then joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, where he remained through 1958. He spent the 1958-1959 academic year at Yale, followed by a brief sojourn as an associate professor at the University of Chicago (1959-1961).

Wolf returned to Europe for fieldwork in the Italian Alps (1960-1961 and summers thereafter), in later seasons collaborating with his student John Cole. Their work focused on national identity and ethnicity, including ethnic conflicts (1974). In 1961 Wolf, hired at the full professor level, joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, where he remained through 1971, serving as department chair in 1970-1971.

When Wolf joined the Michigan anthropology faculty, he entered a department that valued historical approaches and unorthodox thinking. A strong program in anthropological archaeology had been established by James B. Griffin (also an Academy member). A key founder of Michigan’s Department of Anthropology, who overlapped for a few years with Wolf, was Leslie A. White, who wrote extensively about the evolution of culture. White and Julian Steward were two key figures in reviving cultural evolutionary approaches in anthropology after the earlier rejection of those approaches by Franz Boas and his influential students. Wolf ’s Michigan colleagues also included the historically oriented anthropologists Marshall Sahlins (a current Academy member) and Elman Service.

As White, Sahlins, and Service were reviving interest in cultural evolution by focusing on ancient and nonindustrial societies, Wolf chose to study more recent change: historical processes in societies clearly formed within or influenced by the post Columbian world system.

In 1971, Wolf relinquished the chair of the Anthropology Department at Michigan and joined the faculty at Herbert Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and CUNY’s Graduate Center. He became a Distinguished Professor at Lehman/CUNY, where he remained until his retirement in 1992.

During his 21 years at CUNY, the longest time he spent in a single academic locale and thereafter, Wolf developed his interests in the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of historical encounters within the world system. The study of the interaction between local communities and those larger forces would become a key part of anthropological analyses. Wolf, who previously had been highly respected for his work in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe, and on peasants, was catapulted to superstar status within the field of anthropology.

In 1989 Wolf was invited to be the distinguished lecturer at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 1989. The next year he received a $375,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." He used it, even after his retirement from CUNY in 1992, to complete a comparative study of the uses and abuses of power in three different cultural contexts. Two were well-known “anthropological” societies - the Aztecs of Mexico and the Kwakiutl of the North Pacific Coast. The third was Nazi Germany, whose power plays had exerted a direct and profound influence on Wolf's own early life.

Achievements

• Eric Wolf occupies a prominent place in the history of anthropology for several reasons. He helped promote a reorientation in the units of study and analyses used by anthropologists. Wolf helped make the study of history and process a key part of sociocultural anthropology. His focus was on political and economic history, especially within the context of the world system and colonialism. Several prominent focuses in contemporary sociocultural anthropology trace their origins to Wolf; they include political economy, anthropology and history, and studies of culture, history, and power. Wolf's work has inspired the anthropological study of modern nations, which thrive today.

Works

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  • Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century

    ("Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century provides a good sh...)

    1969
  • Peasants

    (This book explores different approaches to peasant studie...)

    1966
  • The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley

    (This award-winning classic in the study of ethnicity, ide...)

    1974
  • Europe and the People Without History

    (Offering insight and equal consideration into the societi...)

    1982
  • Reinventing Anthropology

    (Explores the situation in American anthropology, showing ...)

    1964
  • Envisioning Power

    (With the originality and energy that have marked his earl...)

    1999
  • Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World

    (This collection of twenty-eight essays by renowned anthro...)

    2001
  • The Mexican bajio in the eighteenth century: An analysis of cultural integration 1955
  • Sons of the Shaking Earth 1959
  • In Search Of The Primitive 1981
  • Sons Of The Shaking Earth - People Of Mexico And Guatemala - Their Land, History And Culture

Views

Wolf came to anthropology indirectly, thinking at first that he could understand his fascination with the differences between culture by studying biology. But after taking an anthropology class, he realized that the latter field served his interests better.

Wolf’s work was guided by a belief that culture was a dynamic and changing process, with economic and psychological factors. This differed from the traditional view of culture by anthropologists, who defined culture as a set of attitudes and practices that defined people within them.

Wolf believed that all people in cultures were equally important, and he extended that belief to his students, who found his extremely likable and accessible.

As chair of the newly formed ethics committee of the American Anthropological Association in 1970-1971, Wolf challenged the involvement of anthropologists in counterinsurgency research in Thailand. He and his colleague Joseph Jorgensen, also a member of the committee, resigned in protest of the AAA’s handling of the matter and forcefully criticized what they saw as the misuse of anthropological expertise (1971). The controversy surrounding the affair led the AAA to adopt a code of professional ethics, which it maintains after recent revisions.

Wolf was a Marxist in the 1950s America which meant he wasn't able to be too upfront about it in the beginning. But he was strongly influenced by Marxist historians in the United Kingdom, and later by the Cultural Studies crowd around Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams in the 1970s. Many of these authors were interested in the earlier "humanist" works of Marx, rather than the later work that was seen as more rigidly structural (and this would be one of his main divisions with writers like Althusser, who primarily read the later Marx, and tried to derive structural laws from it).

As a Marxist Wolf was interested in class analysis, but he was particularly interested in describing those pieces of a class structure that didn't entirely fit. His life-long interest in peasant societies was part of this: were peasants just a feudal holdover or was it possible to describe their relationship with the capitalist economy in more nuanced ways? To do so meant studying the historical complexity of people's economic and political activities.

He was also particularly suspicious of analyses that were a-historical, a problem with the anthropology of both the Boasian school of cultural relativism and the Structuralist school. Concepts like "culture" he claimed, tended to make groups seem more like things than like relations, leading to a disconnected view of the world.

Quotations: "By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other line so many hard and round billiard balls."

"If culture was conceived originally as an entity with fixed boundaries marking off insiders against outsiders, we need to ask who set these borders and who now guards the ramparts.”

Membership

Wolf was a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Anthropological Association.

Personality

Wolf’s lifelong fascination with cultural diversity can be traced to his childhood in multilingual Vienna and his teen years in multiethnic Sudetenland, where his Austrian father (his mother was Russian) ran a textile factory prior to the 1938 Nazi takeover. To avoid persecution as Jews, Wolf and his family moved first to England and then to the United States, where they settled in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York.

A prolific, thoughtful, and generous scholar and a true gentleman, Wolf was liked and admired by his colleagues and students. Although a native German speaker, Wolf easily mastered English and had only the slightest accent. He had a talent for using clear language in speaking and writing, even when expressing complex ideas. A soft-spoken man, he nevertheless commanded attention through his ideas, erudition, and the genuine interest he expressed in listening to what his colleagues and students had to say.

He and his first wife, Kathleen Bakeman Wolf, known as Katia (who worked as a counseling social worker), liked to entertain. Their home on Forest Street in Ann Arbor was like a salon, where anthropologists, historians, and sociologists met and debated while enjoying food and drink.

Connections

Wolf was married twice. On September 24, 1943, he was married to Kathleen Bakeman. Their marriage ended in divorce. They had two children, John David and Daniel Jacob.

On March 18, 1972, Wolf married for the second time to Sydel Finfer Silverman.

Father:

Arthur George Wolf

Mother:

Maria (Ossinovski) Wolf

ex-wife:

Kathleen Bakeman Wolf

Wife:

Sydel Finfer Silverman Wolf

May 20, 1933 – March 25, 2019

Son:

John David Wolf

Son:

Daniel Jacob Wolf

collaborator:

Sidney Wilfred Mintz

November 16, 1922 – December 27, 2015

mentor:

Hortense Powdermaker

December 24, 1900 – June 16, 1970

Hortense Powdermaker was Eric Wolf's mentor at Queens.

teacher:

Benedict Ruth Fulton

June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948

Ruth Benedict was one of Wolf’s teachers.

Friend:

Robert Burns Jr.

Robert Burns Jr. was Wolf's best friend in the 1960s.

colleague:

Marshall Sahlins

colleague:

Elman Service

References

• Social History of Anthropology in the U.S.