Bio: (1923-1999) Austrian-American anthropologist. Eric Wolf was born in Austria, but due to the rise of Nazism, he emigrated to Britain, and then to the United States, where he earned a doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University. During his studies in Colombia, he came under the influence of Marxist anthropologist Julian Steward and his approach of cultural ecology. Wolff conducted ethnographic research in Mexico and Puerto Rico and taught at the universities of Michigan and New York. His theoretical orientation relied on the tradition of Marxist anthropology, which was focused on the study of political economy.

Wolf's main contribution to anthropology is a departure from the classical view of traditional societies as static and isolated systems. Small traditional societies are part of broader political relations of power and economic relations of exploitation. In addition, the political economy of the wider society influences changes in the economic and cultural aspects of these communities, so it is wrong to view them as static societies. Although evolutionary theories have influenced Wolf's paradigm, he rejects their schematic and emphasizes the dynamics of interconnected and dependent subsystems of society. His theory emphasizes the importance of power relations in all societies but also studies the resistance to power relations and domination. He made great contributions to various fields of social science: political anthropology, historical sociology, rural sociology, state formation and capitalism, colonialism, revolutions, etc.

                                        Peasant society

In his book Sons of Shaking Earth (1959), Wolf synthesized ethnological, historical, and archaeological data on Mesoamerican civilizations in the context of class-oriented theory. In the mid-1960s, Wolf became known for his study of peasant societies, and the results of this research are presented in two books: Peasants (1966) and Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969). He believes that peasants are populations that function, politically and economically, between isolated tribes and industrial society. The peasants are, for the most part, economically self-sustaining, that is, they produce almost everything they need and make only a part of their agricultural or handicraft products for the market. In some situations, the peasants sell their products themselves, while in others, these products represent a form of tax or rent in kind received by landowners or feudal lords.

However, the political and economic relations of the peasants with the wider society always have some form of domination and coercion. As a result, conservative attitudes and resistance have emerged. These resistances can take many forms, from resistance to taxation to the tendency to resist being pushed into the proletariat. In the book Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, Wolf examines how peasant resistance contributed to the revolutionary transformations of the regime in Mexico, Russia, China, Vietnam, Algeria, and Cuba. He concludes that peasant resistance, most often, results in the return to the previous state, and doesn’t lead to complete changes in the society.

                              Societies and Modes of Production

In Europe and People Without History (1982), Wolf introduces a historical classification of societies according to the basic mode of production they used. These three types are: kinship, tributary, and capitalist. In the kinship system, the organization of work, production, and distribution are organized on the kinship relations of people. In the tributary system, direct producers have the means to produce, but the elite in these societies appropriate surplus labor by political or other non-economic means. The Asian mode of production is an example of a centralized, and European feudalism of a decentralized tributary production system. In Europe, in the period from the 16th to the 18th century, there was a mercantilist tributary system. The capitalist system did not appear until the end of the eighteenth century in England. The unique combination of historical and geographical circumstances led to the liberal political revolution, the industrial revolution, and the development of the free market in England at the same time, all of which were necessary preconditions for the emergence of capitalism. Great Britain contributed to the division of the world into zones of interest of European powers through its colonial expansion.

All those societies that anthropologists view as ahistorical, due to the spread of capitalism through colonial imperialism, form part of global capitalism. Both European colonial societies and "societies without history" are, in fact, interconnected and equally dynamic. Processes that took place at the local level played a major role in the events in the wider world system. Wolf combines Marx's approach to "modes of production" with the cultural ecology of Julian Steward to explain how different modes of production adapt to specific environmental circumstances. The three forms of production singled out by Wolf, and their specific ways of functioning in specific historical and ecological relations, are an analytical tool for understanding the interaction and causality between different societies, and thus a means for understanding the functioning of the wider world economic system and its historical change.

                                   Culture and Ideology

Wolf pays more attention to culture and political ideologies in his book Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis  (1999). Power relations are always present, but these relations depend not only on political and economic but also on cultural patterns. Ideology serves as a means of justifying power relations and domination, but the nature of that ideology will also depend on broader cultural patterns, as well as on the unique historical sequence of events in a society. Wolff examines, in detail, what kind of ideologies of domination emerged in different societies: among the Kwakiutl people on the northwestern Pacific coast of the United States; the Aztecs; and the Nazi Party of Germany. Each of these ideologies was adapted to the specific cultural, historical, ecological, and economic uniqueness of these societies, and functioned to justify and organize relations of domination and social organization of labor.

Main works

Sons of the Shaking Earth (1959);

Anthropology (1964);

Peasants (1966);

Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969);

The Human Condition in Latin America (1972);

The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley (1974);

Europe and the People Without History (1982);

Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis (1999);

Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World (2001).