Eric Wolf

This article is about the anthropologist Eric Wolf. On the legal philosopher see Erik Wolf .

Eric Robert Wolf (born February 1, 1923 in Vienna as Erich Robert Wolf ; † March 6, 1999 in Irvington , New York ) was an American anthropologist of Austrian origin. He was best known for his studies of Latin America and Marxist views.

Life

Eric Wolf was of Jewish descent and the son of Arthur George and Maria Ossinovsky Wolf. He spent his childhood in Bohemia . After the "Anschluss" of Austria and the resulting threat from the National Socialists, the family had to emigrate to England in 1938 and then to the USA in 1940 . In New York , Wolf attended Queens College . Eric Wolf and Kathleen Bakeman married on September 24, 1943. The marriage ended in divorce in 1972, and Wolf was a second marriage to anthropologist Sydel Silverman.

Towards the end of the Second World War he fought in the 10th US Mountain Division in the Italian Alps. Here Eric Wolf got to know the German-Italian language border in the Trentino-South Tyrol region . Together with John Cole, he carried out a study on the Non Valley in 1960/61 , which was first published in 1974.

As a returning soldier, Eric Wolf used the GI Bill of Rights to continue his studies. In 1946 he received his B.A. in sociology and anthropology. Wolf then studied with Ruth Benedict and Julian Haynes Steward at Columbia University . Under the guidance of Steward Wolf began in 1947 in the project , the people of Puerto Rico with the fieldwork for the coffee farmers . Wolf received his doctorate in 1951 with his dissertation on this research project. Wolf also conducted field research in Mexico in 1951–52, 1954 and 1956.

Eric Wolf taught at the following universities:

• 1952–1955: Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois .
• 1955–1958: Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia .
• 1958-1959: Yale University .
• 1959–1960: Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago .
• 1961–1971: Professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor . Here he and his colleague Marshall Sahlins organized the first teach-in against the Vietnam War .
• 1971–1992: Distinguished Professor at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York . It was here in 1974 that he began working on his major work, Europe and the Peoples Without History .

In 1986 Wolf was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and in 1990 he was a MacArthur Fellow . He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1995 .

position

Columbia University was in the first half of the 20th century a base of cultural anthropology in the USA as understood by Franz Boas and his students. After Boas's death in 1942, his anthropological style, firm anti-evolutionism, and positivist penchant for detailed study went out of style. Julian Steward, who had studied with Robert Lowie and Alfred Kroeber , had become the new chairman of the anthropological department . Steward represented a cultural ecology and at the same time, as an unorthodox Marxist, an evolutionist view of anthropology: He wanted to explain how societies can arise and how they can adapt to their environment.

Wolf belonged to a group of older leftist as well as Marxist students who semi-ironically called themselves the Mundial Upheaval Society (literally: secular upheaval ). These progressive students had consciously experienced the Great Depression and participated in World War II. Wolf himself mentioned the following fellow students as MUS members:

• Sidney Mintz , Morton Fried , Elman Service , Stanley Diamond , Daniel McCall , Robert Manners , Rufus Mathewson and John Murra as onlookers. Robert F. Murphy and the younger Marvin Harris were also student stewards who later became famous and influential.

Eric Wolf's relevance to anthropology is due to the fact that he dealt with issues such as power , politics, and colonialism during the 1970s and 1980s , when these phenomena were the focus of disciplinary attention. Europe and the People Without History demonstrates that the non-Europeans had built up complex trade networks long before European expansion and had been trapped in global processes such as the fur and slave trade since Christopher Columbus : The non-European peoples were not " frozen in time " or " isolated ", but always deeply embedded in world history . Europe and the People Without History is considered "a classic of ethnology".

In the last few years of his life, Wolf warned of the " intellectual deforestation " that occurs when anthropology goes to theoretical heights instead of concentrating on the realities of life and field research.

Publications

author

• The Mexican Bajío in the 18th Century . Tulane University, Middle American Research Institute 1955.
• Sons of the Shaking Earth. The People of Mexico and Guatemala. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1959.
• Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey 1964.
• Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey 1966.
• Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. Harpercollins College, New York 1969.
• Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press, Berkeley 1982, ISBN 0-520-04898-9 , new edition 1997.
  • German edition: The peoples without history. Europe and the rest of the world since 1400 . From the American by Niels Kadritzke. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-593-33668-5
• The Human Condition in Latin America . Together with Edward C. Hansen. Oxford Uni Press, New York 1979, ISBN 0-19-501569-X
• The hidden frontier. Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley . Together with John W. Cole. Academic Press, New York et al. London 1974.
  • New edition: Berkeley University of California Press, 1999, ISBN 0-520-21681-4
  • German edition: The invisible border. Ethnicity and ecology in an alpine valley . From the American by Günther Cologna, Folio, Vienna 1995, ISBN 978-3-85256-002-1
• Envisioning power. Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis, Berkeley 1999.
• with Sydel Silverman: Pathways of Power. Building an Anthropology of the Modern World, University of California Press, Berkeley 2001.

editor

• Religious Regimes and State Formation. Perspective from European Ethnology. State University of New York Press 1991.

Secondary literature

• Jan Abbink et al. Hans Vermeulen (Ed.): History and Culture. Essays on the Work of Eric R. Wolf . Spinhuis, Amsterdam 1992, ISBN 90-73052-19-X .
• T. Assad: Are There Histories of Peoples Without Europe? . In: Comparative Studies in Society and History . Vol. 29, 1987, pp. 594-607.
• Carola Lentz : Eric Wolf . In: Christian F. Feest , Karl-Heinz Kohl (Hrsg.): Hauptwerke der Ethnologie (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 380). Kröner, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-520-38001-3 , pp. 514-519.
• Jane Schneider et al. Rayna Rapp (Ed.): Articulating Hidden Histories. Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf. University of California Press, Berkeley 1995, ISBN 0-520-08582-5 .

Lexica entries

• Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin, 18th to 20th centuries . Ed .: Austrian National Library, Vienna. KG Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 (Volume 3) p. 1497.
• International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 . Ed .: Herbert A. Straus, Werner Röder. Saur, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-598-10089-2 (Volume 2 / IL-Z), p. 1257.

Web links

• Literature by and about Eric Wolf in the catalog of the German National Library
• Minnesota State University. Jacque Braun: biography. Archived from the original on June 3, 2010 ; accessed on January 22, 2014 . 
• Indiana University: Soo Kyung Lim: Biography.
• Chapter “Eric Wolf” in Theoretical Foundations of Economic Anthropology on OEKU Online ( Memento from October 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) in the Internet Archive on archive.org, as of October 8, 2007, as of November 24, 2009
• Obituary: Eric Wolf , obituary by Adam Kuper of March 13, 1999 in The Independent , London (English)

Remarks

1. ↑ Eric R. Wolf et al. Sydel Silverman: Pathways of Power , University of California Press, Berkeley 2001, p. 4 ( Introduction: An Intellectual Autobiography ).
2. ↑ http://www.sehepunkte.de/2017/02/28834.html