Skip to content

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.

Another quote →

More quotes by Eric Wolf

Everywhere in this world of 1400, populations existed in interconnections.

There may be "pie in the sky when you die" but how the pie is dished out on the ground has considerable existential relevance.

Preface (1997)

Man rises up against nature by means of what we would today call culture.

In order to understand what the world would become, we must first know what it was.

The capitalist state exists to ensure the domination of one class over another.

All Eric Wolf quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Eric Wolf (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.