Eric R. Wolf

Eric Wolf
Spouse	Sydel Silverman

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

Wolf was born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family. Wolf has described his family as nonreligious, and said that he had little experience of a Jewish community while growing up. His father worked for a corporation and was also a Freemason. Wolf described 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 work 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 part 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 made him aware of cultural difference in a new way. In 1940, Wolf was interned in an alien detention camp in Huyton, near Liverpool, England. The detention camp was a high stress environment. It was there that Wolf became exposed 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 especially influenced by the German Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias who was also interned there.

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