Eric Wolf

Eric Robert Wolf February 1, 1923 – March 6, 1999 was an anthropologist, best required for his studies of peasants, Latin America, as well as his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology.

Early life

Wolf was born in Vienna, Austria to the Jewish family. Wolf has returned his manner as nonreligious, & said that he had little experience of a Jewish community while growing up. His father worked for a combine and was also a Freemason. Wolf forwarded his mother, who had studied medicine in Russia, as a feminist—"not in terms of declarations, but in terms of her stand on human possibilities." In 1933, his father's name moved the family to Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, where Wolf attended German Gymnasium. He describes his life in the 1920s and 30s in segregated Vienna and then in proletarianizing Czechoslovakia as attuning him early on to questions surrounding class, ethnicity, and political power. The social divisions in Vienna and conflicts in the region in the 1930s influenced Wolf's later scholarly work.

Wolf and his family moved to England and then to the United States to escape Nazism. Wolf went to the Forest School, in Walthamstow, Essex, for two years, where he learned English and became interested in science, in component because of the strong emphasis on science of the school's Canadian headmaster. Despite learning English only when he arrived at the school as a teenager, he won the school's English essay prize. Moving to England also delivered him aware of cultural difference in a new way. In 1940, Wolf was interned in an alien detention camp in Huyton, nearly Liverpool, England. The detention camp was a high stress environment. It was there that Wolf became produced to the organizational possibilities of socialism and communism. Through seminars organized by intellectuals in the camp, he was also exposed to the social sciences. Wolf was particularly influenced by the German Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias who was also interned there.

Later in 1940, Wolf emigrated to the United States—the same period that 300,000 Jews emigrated to the U.S. from Germany. He enrolled in Queens College in New York City and also spent a summer at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1941. Spending time in the South enable Wolf to see a different side of the United States than he was familiar with from New York. Wolf was in the army and fought overseas in World War II, serving in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division. After returning from Europe, Wolf finished college at Queens College. There, Wolf became interested in anthropology, and later went on to examine anthropology at Columbia University.