Wolf, Eric 1923-1999

Quotes
“The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like “nation,” “society,” and “culture” name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding.” (Europe and the People Without History, pg. 3)

"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." (Europe and the People Without History, pg 6.)

"[I]f 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.” (Envisioning Power, pg. 67)

Biography and History
Eric Wolf was born into an Austrian Jewish family in 1923, but moved to England and later the United States as a teenager. He studied anthropology at Columbia University, under Julian Steward. Although Steward and Wolf were very much part of the Boasian tradition of anthropology (and Wolf remained a proponent of 4-field anthropology throughout his career), in the 1950s they established a distinctly Marxist analytic form which came to be called "Political Economy."

Wolf's early works were with peasant communities in Mexico and the Caribbean, work which later became global in scope. His most famous book, Europe and the People Without History (1982) is a study of the global history of interconnections between places and cultures.

He was an outspoken political thinker and engaged intellectual, and built a tradition of leftist anthropology at the City University of New York, where he taught until his death in 1990.

Work
He was part of an early school of Political Ecology with Julian Steward in the 1950s, but really he was a Marxist in disguise, and ecology was just part of his historical materialism.

He's probably best known for Peasant Wars of the 20th Century and Europe and the Peoples Without History. But his ethnographic work in Mexico and the Caribbean was all about trying to understand the segmentation of peasant class structures, and coming up with an anti-romantic understanding of how peasant economies were "articulated" to capitalist ones. He (along with a handful of others, like Sidney Mintz, Bill Roseberry, Julian Steward) spawned "Peasant Studies" as we know it in anthropology

Europe and the Peoples Without History (1982) is a somewhat later work that is an attack on both the hermeneutic school of Clifford Geertz and on Structuralism. In it he claims that the essentialization of non-European others (claiming them to have timeless cultures, unlike the "historical cultures" of Europeans) is an extension of colonial thinking. His book is an attempt to think of all of world history through its historical connections (rather than its ahistorical disconnections), following the movements of labour, commodities, and violence around the globe.

Influences
Wolf was a Marxist in 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 UK, 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).

Along with them, he began to read Gramsci and Bakhtin in the 1970s and was instrumental in popularizing their work in anthropology. He nonetheless had a fairly orthodox view of those writers, and an interpretation that wasn't as radical as the literary theorists (such as the Subaltern Studies school) who would appropriate those thinkers in the 1980s.

Wolf was one of the most influential anthropologists of his generation, and became the most well-known voice for the Political Economy school in the 1970s and 1980s. Peoples Without History is still considered one of the foundational texts of anthropology, and a tour-de-force piece of empirical theory-making.

Analysis
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 societes was part of this: were peasants just a feudal holdover (as many romantics and Marxists believed) 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 (as Marx himself had done in some earlier works, such as The Eighteenth Brumaire).

He was also particularly suspicious of analyses that were a-historical, a problem with 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. “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" (Wolf 1982: pg).

Critique
His work bears some resemblance to what came to be called "World Systems Theory," associated especially with Emmanuel Wallerstein, who thought that it was possible to describe the entire world as a single system of exploitation with "centres" and "peripheries." World System Theory was itself an elaboration of Dependency Theory, which had a very strong following in Latin America, where Wolf did almost all of his work. Much of this analysis, like a lot of Marxist writing before it, was later criticized for being too broad, and ultimately for reducing too much historical complexity to a single storyline. In the 1980s, so-called "grand narratives" became unpopular with authors who wanted to see more historical specificity, more voice and agency for actors living in marginal situations. Even through Wolf had decried various kinds of reductionism himself, his work still bore all the hallmarks of a grand narrative that fit people's wildly different experiences into a single story about the world that they might or might no believe in.

In some ways this critique was just a continuation of a long-standing tension in anthropology between those who believed in large historical inferences (in which Marxism clearly fit) and those who insisted on the particularities (beginning with Weber, Boas, Geertz, and eventually the critical theorists and post-modernsits of the 1980s).