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Eric Wolf Quotes

1923–1999 Austria

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 Marxian perspectives within anthropology. He held a joint position as a Distinguished Professor at both Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center beginning in 1971, where he spent the remainder of his career.

Austria
Academics
Anthropologists

Random Eric Wolf quote

25 quotes

Anthropology is the most scientific of humanities, the most humanistic of sciences. (1964)

Although I wrote as an anthropologist rather than as a professional historian, I think history matters. It is also important to understand how an why these systems develop and extend their sway over people, and I located the rationale in the ways power and the economy sustain and drive each other on.

Preface (1997)

Even the slave owner is restricted in his ability to manipulate his labor supply, for he must protect his investment in slaves by feeding them during times when they do not labor. In contrast, capitalist entrepreneurs can hire and fire laborers or very their wages in response to changing circumstances.

Only when the stock of wealth can be related to human energy by purchasing living energy as "labor power", offered for sale by people who have no other means of using their labor to ensure their livelihood: and only when it can relate that labor power to purchased machines - embodiments of past transformation of nature by human energy expended in the past - only then does "wealth" become "capital".

By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Eric Wolf (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.