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Eric Robert Wolf 1923-1999 ERIC ROBERT WOLF 1923-1999 A Biographical Memoir by CONRAD PHILLIP KOTTAK © 2012 The National Academy of Sciences Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. ERIC WOLF ERIC ROBERT WOLF February 1, 1923–March 6, 1999 BY CONRAD PHILLIP KOTTAK Eric Robert Wolf, an Austrian-born sociocultural anthropologist, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995. Wolf’s lifelong fascination with cultural diversity can be traced to his childhood in multilingual Vienna and his 1 teen years in multiethnic Sudetenland, where his Austrian father (his mother was Russian) ran a textile factory prior to the 1938 Nazi takeover. To avoid persecu- tion as Jews, Wolf and his family moved first to England and then to the United States, where they settled in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. WOLF IN NEW YORK: QUEENS AND COLUMBIA In 1940 Wolf enrolled at Queens College, where he planned to study biochemis- try. That plan changed when an early anthropology course exposed him to a field that encompassed his interests in culture, history, ethnicity, and the gamut of human experience. His mentor at Queens was Hortense Powdermaker. uring World War II, Wolf deferred his college educa- tion for three years Dto serve with the U.S. Army in the Italian Alps, where he would later return for anthropological field- work in 1960 (1974). Returning from combat duty, Wolf resumed his studies at Queens. He received his undergraduate degree from the Department of Anthropology and Sociology in spring 1946. Later that year, financed by the G.I. Bill, he entered graduate school in anthropology at Columbia Univer- Eric Wolf (on right) with unidentified sity, from which he received his colleague while on leave from the U.S. Army in Venice, Italy, April 1945. doctorate in 1951. (Photograph courtesy Sydel Wolf) At Columbia Wolf entered a department still strongly influ- enced by the legacy of its founder, Franz Boas. Ruth Benedict, a Boas student, was one of Wolf’s teachers. In 1947 the influential anthropologist Julian H. Steward, ERIC WOLF an eventual Academy member, lifelong interests in peasants, joined the Columbia faculty, power, class, and patron-client replacing Ralph Linton, who had relationships. moved to Yale. Steward’s wide- ranging interests in contemporary WOLF IN MEXICO, THE ALPS, (as well as ancient) societies, AND THE U.S. HINTERLAND cultural evolution, and large-scale After receiving his doctorate, social processes attracted a coterie Wolf began research in Mexico of left-leaning, politically oriented (1951-1952, 1954, and 1956), Columbia students. Besides Wolf, where he studied not only peasants they included Sidney Mintz (a but also the formation of national frequent early Wolf collaborator), identity, writing an important Morton Fried, Elman Service, article on the Virgin of Guadalupe 3 Stanley Diamond, and Robert as a key national symbol (1958). F. Murphy. Wolf was part of a In 1952 Wolf accompanied his study group that called itself the graduate mentor, Steward, in “Mundial Upheaval Society” his move from Columbia to the with Fried, Service, Diamond, University of Illinois at Cham- Mintz, Robert Manners, and paign-Urbana, where Steward Daniel McCall as he planned his would remain for the rest of his dissertation research (1948-1949), academic career. Wolf taught under Steward’s direction, in a anthropology and worked with coffee-growing community in the Steward at Illinois from 1952 to highlands of Puerto Rico. That 1955, and then joined the faculty at dissertation expressed Wolf’s the University of Virginia, where Wolf, with son David, during a 1960-61 fieldwork trip in the Italian Alps. (Photograph courtesy Sydel Wolf) he remained through 1958. He ethnicity, including ethnic conflicts spent the 1958-1959 academic year (1974). In 1961 Wolf, hired at at Yale, followed by a brief sojourn the full professor level, joined the as associate professor at the Univer- Department of Anthropology at sity of Chicago (1959-1961). the University of Michigan, where Wolf returned to Europe for he remained through 1971, serving fieldwork in the Italian Alps (1960- as department chair in 1970-1971. 1961 and summers thereafter), in A prolific, thoughtful, and later seasons collaborating with generous scholar and a true his student John Cole. Their work gentleman, Wolf was liked and focused on national identity and admired by his colleagues and ERIC WOLF students. At Michigan, where A prolific, thoughtful, and generous I met him when I joined the anthropology faculty in 1968, scholar and a true gentleman, Wolf he was recognized as an excel- was liked and admired by his col- lent colleague and an innovative and concerned academic, who leagues and students. played a major role in organizing the nation’s first Vietnam antiwar Although a native German teach-in in 1965. speaker, Wolf easily mastered As chair of the newly formed English and had only the slightest ethics committee of the American accent. A soft-spoken man, he Anthropoligical Association in nevertheless commanded attention 1970-1971, Wolf challenged the through his ideas, erudition, and 5 involvement of anthropologists the genuine interest he expressed in counterinsurgency research in in listening to what his colleagues Thailand. He and his colleague and students had to say. He and Joseph Jorgensen, also a member his first wife, Kathleen Bakeman of the committee, resigned in Wolf, known as Katia (who worked protest of the AAA’s handling of as a counseling social worker), the matter and forcefully criticized liked to entertain. Their home on what they saw as the misuse of Forest Street in Ann Arbor was anthropological expertise (1971). like a salon, where anthropologists, The controversy surrounding the historians, and sociologists met and affair led the AAA to adopt a code debated while enjoying food and of professional ethics, which it drink. maintains after recent revisions. WOLF AT MICHIGAN When Wolf joined the Michigan anthropology faculty in 1961, he entered a department that valued historical approaches and unorthodox thinking. A strong program in anthropological archaeology had been estab- lished by James B. Griffin (also an Academy member). A key founder of Michigan’s Department of Anthropology, who overlapped for a few years with Wolf, was Leslie Eric Wolf 1943 A. White, who wrote extensively (Photograph courtesy Sydel Wolf) about the evolution of culture. White and Julian Steward were Eric Wolf had a talent for two key figures in reviving cultural using clear language in speaking evolutionary approaches in anthro- and writing, even when expressing pology after the earlier rejection complex ideas. He wrote so well of those approaches by Franz Boas that I could assign his 1959 book and his influential students. Wolf’s Sons of the Shaking Earth—which Michigan colleagues also included drew on archaeology, history, and the historically oriented anthropol- other fields to encapsulate Mexico’s ogists Marshall Sahlins (a current diverse cultures and history—to my Academy member) and Elman introductory anthropology course. ERIC WOLF Service. The latter, as noted previ- Peasants (1966) was a short but ously, had been a fellow student with Wolf at Columbia and shared influential book that challenged with him World War II combat the stereotype of peasants as experience and a lifelong commit- ment to social justice. (During backward survivors of a rural past the 1960s Michigan had so many untouched by recent world history. Columbia Ph.D.s—including Wolf, Sahlins, Service, Roy Rappaport, Niara Sudarkasa, and the author world system, and colonialism, of this memoir—that people talked and his penchant for interdisci- of a “Columbia-Michigan axis,” plinary collaboration with social made up of anthropologists inter- historians like Charles Tilley 7 ested in evolution, ecology, and and Sylvia Thrupp (two other social change.) Michigan colleagues), Wolf was a As White, Sahlins, and key figure in Michigan anthropol- Service were reviving interest in ogy’s historical turn. The focus cultural evolution by focusing on on social and cultural history and ancient and nonindustrial societies, comparative approaches that Wolf Wolf chose to study more recent helped inspire is embodied today change: historical processes in by Michigan’s outstanding joint societies clearly formed within or doctoral program in anthropology influenced by the post-Columbian and history. world system. Because of his Key works that Wolf wrote at interests in cultural history, the Michigan included Peasants (1966) and Peasant Wars of the Twentieth feature of peasants (as compared, for example, with tribal cultiva- tors) was their obligation to turn over part of what they produced (Wolf called it “rent”) to landlords, government officials, and other higher-ups within the social hier- archy. In his later book Europe and the People Without History (1982) Wolf would characterize such a system as a tributary mode of production, and contrast it with kin-based and capitalist modes of production. Wolf’s recognition in Peasants of Eric Wolf, 1968, in southeast Asia. inclusion within larger systems of (Photograph by Myron Cohen, courtesy Sydel Wolf) people previously considered back- ward, isolated, or marginal would Century (1969). Peasants was a short reemerge and be applied much but influential book that chal- more broadly in his best-known lenged the stereotype of peasants work, Europe and the People Without as backward survivors of a rural History. past untouched by recent world Peasant Wars of the Twentieth history. Rather, as Wolf pointed Century (1969) examined popular out, peasants could not be under- revolutions in Russia, Mexico, stood apart from the nation-states China, Algeria, Cuba, and in which they lived. A defining Vietnam from the perspective of ERIC WOLF peasants, whose ways of life had the next year he married Sydel been threatened or destroyed by Silverman, herself a prominent actions of world powers, including anthropologist, who would be his the United States in Vietnam.
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