Eric Wolf

Eric Wolf was an Austrian-born American anthropologist known for his critique of anthropology's traditional focus on small, seemingly isolated societies studied apart from their historical and global context. In Europe and the People Without History (1982) he argued that the societies anthropologists conventionally studied had in fact long been entangled with expanding European capitalism and the wider world political economy, and that treating them as timeless, bounded, and history-less obscured the real historical processes, including colonialism and the slave and fur trades, that had shaped them. His insistence on connecting local ethnography to global political-economic history was influential in the development of world-systems-informed and politically engaged anthropology.