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Eric Wolf- Cultural Anthropologist

Background Information

  • Eric Wolf was born on February 1st 1923 and died on March 6th 1999
  • He was a Cultural Anthropologist with many achievements over his life time
  • He was born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish Family
  • They moved to England then the United States to escape the Nazi's, this is where he learned how to speak English
  • He was interned in an alien detention camp in Huyton, England
  • Studied Latin American throughout his life

Work in Society

  • He was partially known for his study of peasants
  • Found that peasant communities form an integral part of larger complex societies
  • He says it is important to a society in historical context as well as within a larger community
  • He thinks the purpose of Anthropology is to explain the world

Marxism

Societal Views

  • Wolf has shown his public support of Marxism, this is a world view/method of societal analysis that focus on class relations and societal conflict that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development and a dialectical view of social transformation
  • Largely contributed to the Marxist thought
  • 2 branches of Marxism: Systems Marxism and Promethean Marxism
  • He takes a strong stance against functionalism
  • This views society as a bounded system of ordered relations and a structured entity
  • He views society heterogeneous; diverse in character or context
  • Simply he says it is a bunch of different things mixing together

Symbolizes optimism for freedom from economic and political mistreatment for a more desirable future

Discipline of assuming the existence/ truth of something that could be used to frame general laws or patterns of social development

Disciplinary Imperialism

  • Wolf came up with the idea of disciplinary imperialism
  • This idea states that cultural anthropology is different than social anthropology, which is also different then sociology, and history in the American and Americanized global academic community

Power

  • Much of Wolf's work deals with issues of power
  • He proposes a redefinition of culture that emphasizes power and diversity, ambiguity, contradiction, and imperfectly shared meaning of knowledge
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