Eric Wolf facts for kids

Eric Robert Wolf (born February 1, 1923 – died March 6, 1999) was an important anthropologist. He was famous for studying peasants (people who farm small pieces of land). He also studied Latin America and used ideas from Marxism in his work.

Eric Wolf's Early Life

Growing Up in Vienna

Eric Wolf was born in Vienna, Austria. His family was Jewish, but not very religious. He said he didn't have much experience with the Jewish community when he was young.

His father worked for a company and was also a Freemason. Wolf described his mother as a feminist. She had studied medicine in Russia.

In 1933, his father's job moved the family to Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. Eric went to a German school called a Gymnasium there. Living in Vienna and then Czechoslovakia taught him early on about social classes, different ethnic groups, and political power. These experiences influenced his later studies.

Studying and Living Abroad

Wolf and his family moved to England and then to the United States. They were escaping Nazism in Europe. Eric attended the Forest School in England for two years.

He learned English there and became interested in science. Even though he learned English as a teenager, he won the school's English essay prize. Moving to England also made him see cultural differences in a new way.

In 1940, Wolf was held in a detention camp in Huyton, near Liverpool, England. This camp was a stressful place. There, he learned about the ideas of socialism and communism. He also learned about the social sciences from smart people in the camp. A German Jewish sociologist named Norbert Elias greatly influenced him.

Later in 1940, Wolf moved to the United States. He went to Queens College in New York City. He also spent a summer at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1941. Being in the South showed him a different part of the U.S. than New York.

Wolf joined the army and fought in World War II in Italy. After the war, he finished college at Queens College. He became interested in anthropology there. He later studied anthropology at Columbia University.

Eric Wolf's Career in Anthropology

Columbia University was a very important place for anthropology in America. Famous anthropologists like Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict had worked there. When Wolf arrived, the new head of the anthropology department was Julian Steward.

Steward wanted to create a scientific way to study anthropology. He aimed to explain how societies changed and adapted to their environment. Wolf was one of many students who worked with Steward. Many of these students had Marxist ideas. These ideas fit well with Steward's focus on how societies developed.

Some famous anthropologists from the 1980s were part of this group. They included Sidney Mintz, Morton Fried, and Elman Service.

Wolf did his first major research for Steward's "People of Puerto Rico" project. In 1961, Wolf started teaching at the University of Michigan. He later became a professor at Lehman College, CUNY. In 1971, he moved to the CUNY Graduate Center, where he stayed for the rest of his career.

Besides his work in Latin America, Wolf also did fieldwork in Europe. He studied the culture and history of the Tyrol region with his student, John W. Cole. They wrote a book about it called The Hidden Frontier.

Wolf's most important contributions were about power, politics, and colonialism. These topics became very important in anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. His most famous book is Europe and the People Without History. In this book, he criticized how European history often ignored people outside the ruling classes.

He showed that non-Europeans were active in global events. For example, they were involved in the fur trade and slave trade. This meant they were not "frozen in time" or "isolated." They had always been part of world history.

In 1989, Wolf gave a speech where he warned anthropologists. He said they often "kill old ideas, only to see them come back to life." He believed anthropology should build on past knowledge. He thought anthropologists should focus on real-life situations and fieldwork, not just complex theories. Eric Wolf died in 1999 after battling colon cancer.

Eric Wolf's Key Ideas

Understanding Power

Much of Eric Wolf's work focused on the idea of power. In his book Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (1999), he looked at how power and ideas are connected. He described four different ways power can work:

• Power that an individual person has.
• Power to make someone else do what you want.
• Power to control the situations where people interact.
• Structural power: This is the power that shapes and organizes the very ways people live and interact. It controls how energy and resources flow in society.

Wolf believed that culture and power are closely linked. They are connected through ideas and how property is owned.

Marxism in Anthropology

Eric Wolf was known for his interest in Marxism within anthropology. He believed that Marxist ideas should be understood alongside family relationships and local cultures. He saw two main types of Marxism:

• Systems Marxism: This is about finding general rules or patterns in how societies develop.
• Promethean Marxism: This represents hope for freedom from unfair economic and political treatment. It's about reforming society for a better future.

Activism

Eric Wolf was involved in protests against the Vietnam War. While at the University of Michigan, he helped organize one of the first "teach-ins" against the war. These were informal classes and discussions about the war.

He also criticized some anthropologists who worked closely with the U.S. government in Southeast Asia. He led a successful effort to change the rules for anthropologists. This change aimed to stop anthropological information from being used in military actions.

Personal Life

Eric Wolf had two children from his first marriage, David and Daniel. He later married another anthropologist, Sydel Silverman. In the 1960s, his best friend was anthropologist Robert Burns Jr.. Robert Burns Jr. was the father of the famous filmmaker Ken Burns. When Ken Burns's mother was very sick, Eric Wolf's family helped care for Ken.

Published Works

• The Mexican Bajío in the 18th Century (1955)
• Sons of the Shaking Earth (1959)
• Anthropology (1964)
• Peasants (1966)
• Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969)
• National Liberation : revolution in the third world (contributing essay, 1971)
• The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (with John W. Cole) (1974)
• Europe and the People Without History (1982)
• "Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power--Old Insights, New Questions" (1990)
• Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (1999)
• Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World (with Sydel Silverman) (2001)

See also

In Spanish: Eric Wolf para niños