Eric Wolf; Helped Diversify Anthropology Scholarship
Eric R. Wolf, an anthropologist whose eclecticism and unorthodox ideas about the nature and diversity of the human species helped redefine the boundaries of his discipline, died March 7 at his home in Irvington, N.Y. He was 76 and died of liver cancer.
Wolf, an expert on peasant cultures, taught at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He was the author of several classic works, including “Europe and the People Without History” in 1984 and “Sons of the Shaking Earth” in 1959.
The recipient of a $376,000 MacArthur grant in 1990, Wolf shook the conventions of his field when he blended anthropology with scholarship from other areas, such as history, that anthropologists had long considered alien. Today, anthropology has radically diversified, with subdivisions of specialists in the economic, ecological, legal, political, psychological and even psycho-pharmacological aspects of cultural development. Wolf was a pivotal figure in this evolution.
In a 1980 essay for the New York Times, he explained how his field, from the time of Margaret Mead’s explorations in the 1930s, long thrived on a view of culture, the learned habits and ideas of a people, as the primary explanation for the variety of human development.
Several decades after Mead began, anthropologists have broken out of that mold to the point where it no longer raises eyebrows to ask how cultures are changed by larger behavioral, economic or political systems, or to study peasant and urban societies instead of primitive ones.
“The old culture concept,” Wolf said, “is moribund.”
His early life exposed him to several cultural worlds.
He was born in Austria in 1923 into an assimilated Viennese Jewish family but was a frequent visitor to Manchuria to see his mother’s relatives. When he was 10, his father moved the family to the Sudetenland, where Czech and German culture and language collided and anti-Semitism brewed.
These “extreme differences [in] . . . my own social universe” fascinated him, he once told an interviewer, because he saw the polyglot of cultures as “alien forms of life” swimming in the same social pool. The experiences resonated years later, after the family relocated to the United States. When Wolf, as an intended biochemistry major at Queens College, happened upon a course in anthropology, he was smitten, convinced that this field, not biology, could better explain the panoply of human behavior in the world.
He earned an anthropology degree in 1946 and a doctorate from Columbia in 1951. He held a variety of teaching positions over the next 20 years at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. In 1971 he was appointed distinguished professor of anthropology at Lehman and CUNY, where he delighted in teaching graduates and undergraduates for almost three decades.
His “Sons of the Shaking Earth” established his reputation as an innovative researcher. That work traced Mexico’s cultural development through an unorthodox melding of anthropology with archeology and history. Although noting that armies of graduate students have challenged its details over the years, the Council on Foreign Relations recently declared it one of the most significant books of the century, “a monument to a time when social scientists were able to think large thoughts and write elegant English.”
His later work, “Europe and the People Without History,” examined the impact of colonial capitalism on indigenous culture, a theme he would develop in many other studies.
His last book, “Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis,” drew parallels between the rise to power of the Nazis and Aztecs.
Wolf is survived by his wife, Sydel Silverman; two sons from a previous marriage, David, of Burlington, Vt., and Daniel, of Los Angeles; two stepdaughters, Eve Silverman of Wilton, Conn., and Julie Yorn of Santa Monica; and three grandchildren.
