This panel was convened by Ida Susser at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2022 – Unsettling Landscapes. It builds on the workshop Vision and Method in Anthropology: Forty Years of Eric Wolf’s ‘Europe and the People Without History’, on 23/24 September 2022, organized  in the framework of the ‘Frontlines of Value’ project at the University of Bergen by Don Kalb and Susana Narotzky.

Panel convenor: Ida Susser

Presenters: Don Kalb, Jaume Franquesa, Antonio Maria Pusceddu, Don Nonini, and Sharryn Kasmir

Disscusant: Oana Mateescu

It is forty years ago that Eric Wolf published his pathbreaking “Europe and the People Without History” (1982). The book gave an anthropological account of 500 years of European capitalist imperialism, seen from the peripheries. By doing so, it crystallized and clarified multiple debates in anthropology, history, and social theory that had marked the turbulent 60s and 70s of the last century. It was a book that in retrospect prepared the discipline brilliantly for the accelerating capitalist globalization that would mark the next fifty years.

Paradoxically, while path-breaking qua vision and method, the imminent paths opened by “Europe and the People” were almost immediately cut off. Post-structuralism, postmodernism, and “thick description” combined to destroy systemic, global, and historically explanatory visions. Such theoretical ambitions were shoved aside as “grand narratives” and delegitimized as associated with a totalizing modernism.

Under the guises of “anthropology and history” and “political economy” some of the possibilities inscribed in Wolf’s work were conserved in the 1980s and 90s. They came back to life from the 2000s onwards, carried by a younger generation, as neoliberal globalism became ever more crisis prone and new cycles of contestation were emerging. The new work, now often aligned with critical approaches in geography, focused among others on issues of labor, class, surplus populations, post-development, post-socialism, post-colonialism, austerity, new capitalist extractive and oppressive social forms, migrations, and contestations. This led to a re-uniting of  political, economic, and cultural inquiry under a larger dialectical vision and method, and it came with a renewed interest for Marxian approaches next to for example anarchist, Maussian and Polanyian ones.

What sort of questions would a Wolfian anthropology pose in the current world? What is the Wolfian take on Marx and where lies its exact value? What ought to be the role of history and comparison in the anthropological endeavor? What is the value of archival and secondary sources in anthropological research and theory, next to ethnography? If we compare the Wolfian approach to thinking big with other large scale visions in anthropology – Sahlins, Levi-Strauss, Graeber, Godelier for instance – what specificities emerge that remain overly relevant?

Cite as: FocaalBlog 2022. “Eric Wolf, Europe, Histories, Capitalism. Where are we now?” Focaalblog 22 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/12/22/focaalblog-eric-wolf-europe-histories-capitalism-where-are-we-now/