Eric Robert Wolf (February 1, 1923 – March 6, 1999)[1] was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology.
He describes his life in the 1920s and 30s in segregated Vienna and then in proletarianizing Czechoslovakia as attuning him early on to questions surrounding class, ethnicity, and political power.
[2] Columbia had been the home of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict for many years, and was the central location for the spread of anthropology in America.
By the time Wolf had arrived Boas had died and his anthropological style, which was suspicious of generalization and preferred detailed studies of particular subjects, was also out of fashion.
Many anthropologists prominent in the 1980s such as Sidney Mintz, Morton Fried, Elman Service, Stanley Diamond, and Robert F. Murphy were among this group.
With his student, John W. Cole, he conducted fieldwork on the culture, history, and settlement pattern of the Tyrol region, which was later published in their book The Hidden Frontier.
Wolf's key contributions to anthropology are related to his focus on issues of power, politics, and colonialism during the 1970s and 1980s when these topics were moving to the center of disciplinary concerns.
He also demonstrates that non-Europeans were active participants in global processes like the fur and slave trades and so were not 'frozen in time' or 'isolated' but had always been deeply implicated in world history.
In his Distinguished Lecture for the 1989 American Anthropological Association annual meeting, he warned that anthropologists are involved in 'continuously slaying paradigms, only to see them return to life, as if discovered for the first time.'
As reflected in the title of the book, he is interested in demonstrating ways in which societies written out of European histories were and are deeply involved in global historical systems and changes [7] Much of Wolf's work deals with issues of power.
Instead, he proposes a redefinition of culture that emphasizes power, diversity, ambiguity, contradiction and imperfectly shared meaning and knowledge.
[8] Wolf, known for his interest in and contributions to Marxist thought in anthropology, says that Marxism must be understood in the context of kinship and local culture.
Promethean Marxism symbolized optimism for freedom from economic and political mistreatment and renowned reforming as the fashion to a more desirable future.