Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology.
14 Facts About Eric Wolf
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Eric Wolf has described his family as nonreligious, and said that he had little experience of a Jewish community while growing up.
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Eric Wolf's father worked for a corporation and was a Freemason.
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Eric Wolf 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.
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Eric 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.
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In 1940, Eric Wolf was interned in an alien detention camp in Huyton, near Liverpool, England.
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Eric Wolf was especially influenced by the German Jewish sociologist Norbert Elias who was interned there.
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Eric Wolf enrolled in Queens College in New York City and spent a summer at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1941.
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Eric Wolf was in the army and fought overseas in World War II, serving in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division.
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Eric Wolf was one of the coterie of students who developed around Steward.
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Eric Wolf, known for his interest in and contributions to Marxist thought in anthropology, says that Marxism must be understood in the context of kinship and local culture.
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Eric Wolf was involved in the protests against the Vietnam War.
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Eric Wolf was critical of the close relationship between some anthropologists of Southeast Asia and the US government, and led an ultimately successful attempt to re-write the code of ethics of the American Anthropological Association to prevent anthropological data from knowingly being used in military campaigns.
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Eric Wolf had two children from his first marriage, David and Daniel.