Eric Wolf

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Lore & Background

Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist whose work centered on peasants, Latin America, and Marxist perspectives. Born in Vienna to a nonreligious Jewish family, his father worked for a corporation and was a Freemason, while his mother, who had studied medicine in Russia, was a feminist. Wolf’s early life in segregated Vienna and later in proletarianizing Czechoslovakia, where his family moved in 1933, exposed him to issues of class, ethnicity, and political power. To escape Nazism, the family moved to England, where Wolf attended a school in Walthamstow, learned English, and developed an interest in science. In 1940, he was interned in a detention camp near Liverpool, a high-stress environment where he encountered socialist and communist ideas and attended seminars led by intellectuals, including sociologist Norbert Elias. Later that year, he immigrated to the United States, enrolling at Queens College in New York City. He spent a summer at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, observing a different side of the country. During World War II, he served in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division. After the war, he studied anthropology at Columbia University, where the department was in disarray. Wolf and classmates—including Sidney Mintz and Stanley Diamond—formed an independent study group, jokingly called the Mundial Upheaval Society, united by a socialist outlook. He became a student of Julian Steward, whose scientific evolutionism complemented Wolf’s Marxist leanings. His dissertation was part of Steward’s ‘People of Puerto Rico’ project. Wolf later taught at the University of Michigan and chaired the anthropology department at Lehman College, CUNY, before moving to the CUNY Graduate Center in 1971. He also conducted fieldwork in Europe, studying the Tyrol region with student John W. Cole. His most famous book, *Europe and the People Without History*, critiques mainstream European history for ignoring non-elite actors and shows that non-Europeans were active participants in global processes.

Reader's Guide

Eric Wolf's significance lies in his integration of Marxist perspectives into anthropology and his focus on power, politics, and colonialism during the 1970s and 1980s. His most well-known book, *Europe and the People Without History*, critiqued popular European history for ignoring historical actors outside the ruling classes and demonstrated that non-Europeans were active participants in global processes such as the fur and slave trades. Wolf also criticized what he called 'disciplinary imperialism' within social sciences, arguing that anthropology should be cumulative rather than continuously reinventing paradigms. His legacy includes influencing a generation of anthropologists and emphasizing the importance of fieldwork and explanatory anthropology focused on realities of life.

Did You Know?

• Eric Wolf was born in Vienna, Austria to a nonreligious Jewish family.
• His mother studied medicine in Russia and was a feminist.
• His father was a Freemason.
• Wolf described his early life in segregated Vienna and proletarianizing Czechoslovakia as attuning him to questions of class, ethnicity, and political power.
• He served in the U.S.

Scope and Subfields of the Discipline

Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity that bridges biology and sociology, examining human behavior, biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics across both the present and the past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology focuses on patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology delves into cultural meaning, norms, and values; the combined term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology explores how language shapes social life, and biological (or physical) anthropology investigates the biology and evolution of humans and their close primate relatives. Archaeology, often called the "anthropology of the past," examines human activity through physical remains. In North America and Asia, archaeology is generally regarded as a branch of anthropology, whereas in Europe it is considered either an independent discipline or a subfield of related fields such as history and paleontology.

Etymology and Early Coinage of the Term

The abstract noun "anthropology" was first attested in reference to history. Its present usage first appeared in Renaissance Germany, in the works of Magnus Hundt and Otto Casmann. Their Neo-Latin term "anthropologia" was derived from the Greek combining forms ánthrōpos (meaning "human") and lógos (meaning "study"). The adjectival form had appeared earlier in the works of Aristotle. The word began to be used in English, possibly via the French "Anthropologie," by the early 18th century. In 1647, the Bartholins, early scholars at the University of Copenhagen, defined l'anthropologie as the science treating of man, divided into Anatomy (considering the body and its parts) and Psychology (speaking of the soul). Sporadic use of the term for portions of the subject matter occurred subsequently, including its use by Étienne Serres in 1839 to describe the natural history or paleontology of man based on comparative anatomy.

Nineteenth-Century Institutional Foundations

The nineteenth century saw a wave of institutional formation around the discipline. The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first organization to use the term ethnology, was founded in 1839 and focused on the methodical study of human races. After its founder William Frédéric Edwards died in 1842, it gradually declined until dissolving in 1862. The Ethnological Society of New York, now the American Ethnological Society, was founded in 1842 on its model, and the Ethnological Society of London followed in 1843 as a break-away from the Aborigines' Protection Society. In 1850, Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau created a chair in anthropology and ethnography at the French National Museum of Natural History. In 1863, Richard Francis Burton and James Hunt broke away from the Ethnological Society of London to form the Anthropological Society of London, which henceforth followed the path of the new anthropology rather than just ethnology.

Darwin's Influence and the Comparative Turn

Anthropology and many current fields are intellectual results of the comparative methods developed in the early nineteenth century. Theorists in anatomy, linguistics, and ethnology began making feature-by-feature comparisons of their subject matters, suspecting that similarities between animals, languages, and folkways resulted from processes or laws unknown to them. The publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was the epiphany confirming their suspicions. Darwin and Wallace unveiled the theory of evolution in the late 1850s, triggering an immediate rush to bring it into the social sciences. Paul Broca in Paris, who was forming the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris (meeting first in 1859), became an immediate convert to Transformisme upon reading Darwin. His definition shifted to "the study of the human group, considered as a whole, in its details, and in relation to the rest of nature." Broca also discovered the speech center of the human brain, today called Broca's area.