Eric Wolf

Early Life and Schooling

Eric Robert Wolf was born in Feb.1 1923 and died March 6 1999.

Eric Wolf was an anthropologist that was born in Vienna Austria in February 1923 and was present around the time when Nazis occupied Vienna. Since Wolf and his family were Jewish, in order to avoid persecution from the Nazis his family moved to England and eventually Queens, New York in 1940 (Wolf). He enrolled in Queen’s college but soon joined the army because of WW2 where he did most of his fighting overseas in Europe. After the war, he took advantage of the GI bill of rights (rights for veterans of WW2) and attended Columbia University (Wolf). At Columbia University he studied under Ruth Benedict and Julian Stewart who were and still are famous anthropologists. He later went to be a founding member of a graduate student group called Mundai Upheaval Society which includes some more prominent anthropologists figures who went on to play major roles in anthropology such as Sidney Mintz, Elman Service Stanley Diamond, and Morton Fried (Sparks). This heavy amount of cross-culture interactions such as moving from Austria to England, then to the US, and then back to Europe for WW2 especially during WW2 sparked his interest in Anthropology along with his family history. He said in an interview with Johnathon Friedman in 1987, “I’ve always wanted to find out why there are so many different kinds of people in the world with different cultures partly because of my own family from such different places and backgrounds (Friedman).”

Ideology and Work

Eric Wolf’s work in Anthropology really did come from many countries in Latin America, one of the first being Mexico as he researched “peasants” and how they formed their national identity from past history in an article written “Virgin of Guadalupe” and more famously "Sons of a Shaking Earth"(1959) (Kottack),. This is a constant as he was fascinated by the ideas of underprivileged, or poorer people in other countries. He again wrote at his time as University of Michigan’s Founder of Anthropology department, “Peasants Wars of the Twentieth Century, (1966)” where he looked at how poorer people were essentially tenants to government officials he called landlords giving up the little they have in the social hierarchy and also, “Europe and People Without History (1982)”(Kottack). Where he tackled capitalism, which also a common theme in his works as he was a firm believer in marxism which is essentially the defects and effects of capitalism arguing for communism and also would study historical trends of cultures. Wolf loved to connected the dots and did most of his research of individual cultures in terms of relating it to the world when it came to politics and economics, which is something that was not common as most anthropologists at the time studied cultures as their own individual cases not connecting it as a whole seeing how one culture could affect another (Sparks).

Notable Work

  • Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Print

    • "Talks about the comparison of the effects of European expansion on indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and the Far East. Wolf argued that global markets shaped the practices of these peoples even before their first contacts with Europeans and that market forces had continued to shape these populations through demand for labour, migration, and changes in demands for raw materials" (Sparks) .

  • Wolf, Eric R. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Print.

    • .He was famous for talking about six different peasant revolutions in places ranging from Russia all the way to Mexico. The revolutions all from the point of view of the peasants in the different cultures because of different factors like other cultures (America) and their own government.

  • Wolf, Eric R, Sons of the Shaking Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959

    • He touches on the idea of the history of places like Guatemala and Mexico giving credit to Spanish conquerors of the past and African indigenous groups in terms of politics and societal structures and the different religion and traditions in these Latin American countries. His writing his also praised as it was very cohesive and is more impressive when considered he was an immigrant.

  • Wolf, Eric R., et al. Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2001. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnz1r. Accessed 3 Oct. 2020.

    • This is a very complete collection of Wolf work including 28 essays ranging from peasants, anthropology as a whole, concepts and connecting local cultures to bigger ones or at least the general idea of it.



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