Eric Wolf

1923 - 1999

Born February 1, 1923, in Vienna, Austria, Eric Wolf had always been interested in different cultures. When he was young, Wolf went to school in England where he discovered his love for science.

Moving to the United States, Wolf attended Queens College (now Queens College of the City University of New York). On September 24, 1943 he married Kathleen Bakeman, a social worker. A few years after his marriage, Wolf served in World War II. Going back to school after the war, he earned his Bachelors Degree in Sociology and Anthropology in 1946. With two children, Wolf divorced his wife in 1972 and was remarried to Sydel Silverman, also an anthropologist.

Suggesting that the categories of race, ethnicity and culture are products of a specific social practice common to Western capitalist societies, Wolf also believed that other categories might be forth-coming in other kinds of social forms. Wolf saw discourse on race predominant in the 19th century and discourse on culture increasing in the 20th century. He saw ethnicity emerging as a popular topic in the 1980's and 1990's as world events also forced renewed attention to it. He saw definitions of ethnicity shifting to "formulas of cultural distinctiveness" as though the two were almost synonymous.

Wolf’s work focused on peasants. He considered the problem of how peasantry and the peasant world were integrated into modern industrial society to be the chief issue of our age. Eric Wolf had been studying the effects of European - American expansion as it related to anthropological theory.

Wolf wrote books such as: Anthropology; Peasants; Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century and The Human Condition in Latin America. Perhaps his most famous book was Europe and the People Without History. He contributed to a variety of publications including American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in History and Society, and Revista Mexicana de Antropologia.

Eric Wolf died March 6, 1999.

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Written by Jacque Braun

Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007