Scholar, Activist, Humanist: A Portrait of Eric Wolf (the Charlottesville Years 1955‑1958)

Eric Wolf Before Charlottesville

A brief history of Eric Wolf’s life before 1955 will inevitably leave out important influences, but here I will focus on events that help to put his time in Charlottesville in context. Wolf was born in Vienna in 1923 and raised in a secular Jewish family. His family moved to Sudetenland where his father managed a factory. Wolf recalls the virulent antisemitism of his childhood. Events and symbols he witnessed in a trip he took to Munich as a teenager left an indelible mark, as he witnessed Nazi parades, swastikas, and the denigration of non-Aryan art in museum exhibits. His parents sent him to a ‘safe haven’ boarding school in England for two years during the Nazi occupation when Wolf was 15 years old. But, with war with Germany approaching, England ordered potential ‘enemy aliens’ (Germans, Austrians, socialists, Jews) such as Wolf to an internment camp near Liverpool in 1938.
Intellectuals in that camp organized lectures, and Wolf recalls being drawn to grand-scale ideas in the social sciences by the lectures of sociologist Norbert Elias. Elias was interested in long-term regional social dynamics that referenced regional phenomena and state-formation. Elias’s The Civilizing Process, published in 1939, would likely have been the ideas that most influenced Wolf. [9]
Wolf was only 15 or 16 when he heard Elias speak at the internment camp near Liverpool. Wolf would later agree that Elias’ ideas were important to him in 1940, and then throughout his scholarly career. Elias’s idea that individuals are born into an already established network of people such that the person is a social phenomenon was “an extremely revelatory experience.” [10] Elias’s early work conveyed the scale of study that would come to define Wolf’s work in anthropology, that is that beyond the individual, and acknowledging that terms such as society, culture, and civilization are historically determined. The foundational ideas in Elias would later be seen in Wolf’s interest in regional studies, history and power relations.

Eric Wolf: First Anthropologist at the University of Virginia, 1955

Wolf was hired in his first full faculty position by the University of Virginia in 1955. Rather shockingly, he was the first cultural anthropologist hired in a tenure-track position at the University of Virginia. Until the mid-1950s, UVa and the state of Virginia had not been open to a social science approach that administrators labelled disdainfully as “sentimentalist.” The dean of arts and sciences at UVa from 1934 to 1953, biologist Ivey Lewis, had an inordinately long, powerful and destructive role in curriculum and faculty hiring over that span. Lewis knew of Boas and anthropology but used the terms “Boasian” and “sentimentalist” as equivalent pejoratives in his correspondence. He vowed not to hire any faculty who subscribed to such ‘weak’ thinking. This half-century delay in hiring an anthropologist at UVa reflects more than the thinking of one long-term dean. UVa presidents strongly supported eugenics research, teaching and policy in the University’s Medical School and College and encouraged the regressive and authoritarian leadership of Dean Ivey Lewis. Lewis retired in 1953, just prior to Wolf’s hire. However, in the years of Wolf’s tenure at Virginia, University president Colgate W. Darden Jr. (1947–1959) tolerated the hire of Wolf but supported state policies of segregation and states’ rights, white supremacy and hereditarianism in the college. [29]
Eric Wolf accepted an offer to join UVa’s Sociology and Anthropology Department and arrived in Charlottesville with his first wife Katia in 1955. They rented a house for two years and then purchased a small single-family home in Charlottesville after the birth of their first child. Wolf developed friendships with two sociologists engaged in community studies in Virginia concerned with race and inequality. [30]
Concerning the students and intellectual atmosphere at Virginia, Wolf recalled:

I was the only anthropologist, in a very different setting. Urbana was very big and drew high school graduates from everywhere in the state. Virginia was much more aristocratic, Southern, more limited. I think that move was very good for me, partly because it got me out from under Steward’s aegis, to do my own thing, but also because, I think, there may not have been more than 12 people using the library; it was a very good place to sit down and work on my own materials. [31]

However, University activists opposing state based systemic racism that included the rejection of the momentous 1954 Supreme Court ruling requiring the integration of public schools, were few in number when Wolf arrived at UVa. Those few who spoke against segregation, and the state’s decision to close public schools in Charlottesville rather than open them to African-American students, was decidedly not supported by a university administration aligned with formalized state policy and, itself not open to admitting African-American students or faculty. Jewish faculty were very few in number, never more than three or four at one time since the 1920s. [32]
In a 1987 interview Ashraf Ghani remarked to Wolf that the word ‘system’ had a distinct place in Wolf’s work, beginning about the time he came to Virginia. Ghani asked if the understanding of systems related to his experience at the University of Virginia. Wolf’s response gives testimony to his lifelong interest in interdisciplinary influences on his anthropology, as he replied at some length:

Well, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but it very well might. At Virginia I met Arthur Bachrach, who was in the psychology department. They were going to form a study group on cybernetics and systems theory, and I was invited to join them, and we would read things and then discuss them, and that was also, of course, the point when the concept of information entered the social sciences, and where you could think of relationships having an information component that would act as a governing or a steering mechanism. The whole thing gets a bit mechanical at this point, and also much too cohesive. But I still think of it as a very fruitful way to organize one’s research; it’s a research strategy that really pays off when you’re looking for relationships. It may not be ultimately the explanatory mode that you want, but on the artisan level of how one orders data and thinks about them and looks for connections, that it is a very useful way of doing things.” [33]

The University’s Institute of Social Science Research, in place since 1926 to model the research centers supported by the Rockefeller Fund at Chicago, Yale, and the University of North Carolina, was small but still active at Virginia in 1955. The Institute funded a season of fieldwork and two summers of writing for Wolf. [34] This funding allowed him to complete the deep historical and interdisciplinary classic study of Mexico, Sons of the Shaking Earth in 1959. Anthony Marcus wrote that Sons of the Shaking Earth was:

the definitive historical portrait of the birth of modern Mexico … explains the rise of the Aztec state in pre-Hispanic Mexico, the creation of Spanish America and the cultural processes that led to the Mexican Revolution. Though he never mentioned Marx in the bibliographies of Sons of the Shaking Earth … since the mid-1950s Eric Wolf had been creating the foundations for a Marxist anthropology concerned with the growth of capitalism, the spread of imperialism and the struggle for human liberation. [35]

Sons of the Shaking Earth is still widely read for the clear manner in which it highlights how Mexico’s historically diverse ’nuclear’ areas were integrated into the modern nation-state. [36] Wolf emphasized those points himself, writing retrospectively in 1999:

How groups and social segments are drawn into a nation – economically, socially, politically, and in the realm of ideas – was then, and remains for me now, a problem to be explored. My first book, Sons of the Shaking Earth, attempted to depict the historical trajectory of Mexico as a succession of the different ways in which quite varied groups and units were brought into relationship with one another at different phases over time. Each phase, and the integrative processes that characterized it, had ramifying effects on what was to follow. I see much of my work as efforts to amplify this perspective – to think about how different aggregates and organizations of people, operating on diverse territorial and institutional levels, are drawn into more extensive units, only to be then reshuffled and repositioned into alternative arrangements at some later moment in history. [37]

The University of Virginia was a place where Wolf could do his own research and writing, and he did that laying a deep foundation for the scholarship he would produce throughout the rest of his career as well as where he would demonstrate his humanist-activist commitments.

Wolf’s Anthropology of Race and Anti-Segregation Activism in Charlottesville: 1955–1958

Wolf’s time at UVa and living in Charlottesville coincided with the violent aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision requiring school integration across the Unitd States. Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd called for “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s ruling and Governor Lindsay Almond responded by closing any public school ordered to integrate. One of the first localities to enact the state policy of massive resistance was the city of Charlottesville, as local Black parents attempted to enroll their children in an elementary school. Nearby UVa students at that time were supportive of segregation in the majority and were largely oblivious to the political turmoil in Charlottesville. As for faculty involvement, a noted local civil rights activist observed that not one member of the UVa faculty opposed segregation publicly in newspapers, courtrooms or Virginia’s state committee hearings on school integration that took place in 1954 and 1955 (p. 194). [38]
It was a violent and dangerous time in Charlottesville. Virginia’s race and class relations and record of anti-Semitism had to be a consideration for Wolf, a Jewish refugee in the US, and a Northerner in a Southern university, city and state that were dominated by a commitment to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Charlottesville had an active chapter of the White Citizens’ Council of whom Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “they must be held responsible for all of the terror, the mob rule, and brutal murders that have encompassed the South over the last several years.” [39] The White Citizens’ Council chapter in Charlottesville was headed by John Kasper, a Ku Klux Klan member who took a militant stand against racial integration during the civil rights movement. At least four cross-burnings took place in Charlottesville between 1955 and 1959, and violent threats were made to stores, restaurants, churches, and homes of pro-integrationists. White supremacists painted swastikas on the largest lecture hall at the University of Virginia, on the city’s synagogue and on a private home owned by a Jewish family. An Episcopal church and Presbyterian church adjacent to UVa were defaced with Nazi symbols and threatened as they allowed meetings of pro-integrationists. [40] A Washington Post columnist wrote a story on September 22, 1958, whose text accurately reflected the pithy headline “University Remote from School [Integration] Furor.” [41]
Eric Wolf did not publish on what he experienced in Charlottesville between 1955 and 1958, but his correspondence offers more than a glimpse into those years. In his letters, one can see Wolf’s efforts to bring an anthropological perspective to racial and class tensions in Charlottesville. As the person who hired Wolf to join the faculty at UVa in a joint sociology/anthropology department, Floyd House, realized before him, UVa was not a welcoming place to base a program of opposition to white supremacy and white supremacists. [42] However, along with a very few other faculty, Wolf (and his first wife, Katia) allied with pro-integrationist groups organized in Charlottesville and on several recorded occasions he brought an anthropological perspective to race and class tensions in his local public talks.
Wolf’s correspondence offers insight into what he saw and experienced in Charlottesville and his individual and collective action between 1955 and 1958. At the University of Virginia and in the town of Charlottesville, Wolf offered public lectures on race and provided at least six formal lectures on race to the UVa Medical School. Wolf taught anthropology classes as per usual in the college. When he delivered the lectures in the medical school, he reversed a four-decade path of influence and disciplinary hierarchy at UVa where eugenics dominated long into the 20^th century. He prioritized a Boasian perspective rather than the medical school anatomist/eugenicist’s perspective on biology of racial difference. The content of some of his public lectures were summarized in the daily newspaper of Charlottesville. [43]
Almost immediately upon moving to Charlottesville, Wolf and Katia joined the Charlottesville-based Council on Human Relations, an organization formed in 1956 to work for improved race relations in the area. [44]
Only three other publicly active anti-segregationist faculty are noted by Wolf: Lambert Molyneaux, a colleague in sociology and anthropology, David Cole Wilson, professor of neurology in the University Hospital, and psychologist Arthur Bachrach. Molyneaux joined Wolf in publicly debating a member of the arch-segregationist group Defenders of State Sovereignty in Charlottesville in July 1955. At a public lecture on November 16, 1956, Wolf spoke on the topic of “Modern Races Being Part of the Same Species,” shockingly still a necessary topic to outline. He also joined with Bachrach and Wilson to lecture, each from their own disciplinary perspectives, to fight race-based prejudice and segregation. [45] Sidney Mintz, who visited Wolf in Charlottesville on more than one occasion, wrote to Wolf in 1957 and asked where things were going, as it “sounds as if plenty of trouble is ahead.” Wolf responded, characteristically linking past and present:

The other day a letter even appeared in the local newspaper calling for secession. And while no one in his right mind would advocate this policy, the shadow of the Reconstruction Period is still heavily present in most people’s minds. The present government of the state seems wholly committed to outright defiance of the Supreme Court. … All in all a mess.’ [46]

The local media reported on the Council on Human Relations meetings and the contents of their talks. The Charlottesville Daily Progress summarized one of Wolf’s talks entitled “Modern Races Are Variations of the Same Species.” From the newspaper account, Wolf stated that “many scientific tests have been devised to measure the mental differences between the races, but, to date no such differences in innate psychological traits have been discovered. Results of these tests indicate that mental ability is more related to environment and personal experience than to race.” The next day a letter published on the editorial page of the Charlottesville Daily Progress expressed shock at what was being said at the Council on Human Relations meetings. The letter stated, “I only hope this [letter] will warn some of the people of Charlottesville of what is going on to undermine the white race.” The author of the letter encouraged white citizens to follow who spoke at these meetings and who attended, “to see who is stabbing you in the back. Let’s find out who our enemies are.” [47]
John Bell Williams, a powerful member of the House of Representatives from Mississippi and a national spokesman in support of segregation, came to Charlottesville in August 1957. He attracted 1200 people to the still segregated Lane High School. [48] The Richmond News Leader editorial page blamed the NAACP and Jewish agitators for stoking the fear of violence that preceded and accompanied Williams’ speech, sponsored by the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty. Wolf attended the meeting and took these alarming notes, sent to his father in August 1957:

Sunday night I went to a meeting of the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty, the names by which the local White Citizens Councils are known. I went just to listen and look at the audience. The meeting was called to protest integration in the schools and filled the auditorium at Lane High School with well above 1,000 people. Not just poor whites, but the middle-class backbone of the town or so it seemed to me. The speeches were properly inflammatory, the main speaker being [Rep.] John Bell Williams of Mississippi who combined his considerable talent of a southern folksy storyteller with the bombast of a courtroom lawyer. [49]

Williams inferred that state-tolerated violence and the threat of violence was at a level high enough in Mississippi to deter speech in support of civil rights and school desegregation, and Virginians should take note. Wolf concluded the letter to his father with the observation that “there is a lot of this sort of thing going on and—I am afraid—will go on in the future.” [50]
The Council on Human Relations continued to hold a series of lectures and panel discussions on race relations. Wolf delivered a paper to the Council entitled “History of Race Prejudice” and, according to Katia Wolf, provided the lecture with particular reference to the South. She wrote to Eric’s father: “The other night Eric gave a talk to the Human Relation Council on the “History of Race Prejudice” with particular reference to the South. The talk went very well and was received with enthusiasm. I am sending you the clippings from the local paper.” In March 1958 the Wolfs participated in a public panel discussion entitled “When Desegregation Comes to Charlottesville.” [51]
In those same years, 1955–1958, Wolf not only wrote Sons of the Shaking Earth, but also published several articles in major journals co-authored with Sidney Mintz and Ángel Palerm. He was a scholar-activist in this most dangerous environment and time, and at a precarious moment in his emerging distinguished career. In 1959, Wolf accepted a visiting appointment at the University of Chicago although he secured a promise from the dean at UVa that he could return if he desired after the leave. [52] That would not happen as he moved on to the University of Michigan and then to CUNY–Lehman until his death in 1999.

Linking Philosophy and Action: From Virginia to Southeast Asia

Eric Wolf’s engagement in anti-segregation, anti-white supremacy efforts described here took place in the tinder box of Charlottesville racial tensions and state support of white supremacist ideologies. As activist colleague Lambert Molyneaux explained to a Washington Post writer questioning the lack of engagement by UVa students, faculty and administrators in fighting segregation, being ‘labelled’ a sociologist/anthropologist from UVa was to be labelled with a “smear word” and not get the hearing that most University professors were usually granted in the small university city. [53] The explicit physical and career danger Eric Wolf faced in taking an activist role in Charlottesville would have been a deterrent. Add to this that Wolf’s anthropological mentors might easily have turned him away from a career as a scholar-activist.
But Wolf went his own way, unsupported by the conservative and racist university that hired him and with few colleagues or students there in mutual public action or support. In several obituaries for Wolf, his colleagues noted independently that, as John Gledhill wrote: “Wolf was a leader, not a follower, and a role model for what an academic should be.” [54] This leadership was in view in his public opposition to segregation and white supremacy in Charlottesville which he took on within his first year at UVa. Jane Schneider echoed Gledhill’s sentiment as she described Wolf as a principled and politically engaged scholar, who was, for many, the anthropologist who rendered anthropology relevant to contemporary history, who made this history intelligible, and who exemplified how one could combine moral with intellectual commitments.
Wolf was given credit by many for writing this oft-repeated phrase in his 1964 introductory text: ‘Anthropology is the most scientific of humanities, the most humanistic of sciences.’ The label of humanist comes up time and again from those who knew him as a colleague and as a teacher, as in the words of Jane Schneider that he was a magnanimous humanist. The program he and colleagues built at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York was “an in-gathering of anthropology’s most important leftists” and a center of student activism. Three former PhD students recalled that (in the 1980s) “We took seminars with a scholar whose life work embodied the intersection of politics, scholarship, and activism.” In this essay, I have illustrated Wolf’s commitment to all those dimensions of Anthropology and he had not wavered from his time at Columbia in the early 1950s to his role as Distinguished Professor at Lehman College (CUNY) until his death in 1999. Josiah McC. Heyman wrote that Wolf defied any single label and is best remembered for the framework he modelled for the field of ethical-political-humanism.
Wolf in Charlottesville provides an alternative narrative for a time that is typically portrayed as one of low to no political engagement by anthropologists, or worse, the use of anthropology in collaboration with the U.S. military or serving as ‘objective scientists’ in Indian claims hearings, for example. [55] Of course, he has been widely noted as a co-creator with Marshall Sahlins and other Michigan faculty for organizing anti-Vietnam war protests (coined “teach-ins” by Sahlins) at the University of Michigan. Those protests were organized over the strong threats of the Michigan administration and state politicians not to strike or walk out of class in protest (hence, the decision to “teach in” rather than “walk out”). [56]
Aram Yengoyan, writing to Sidney Mintz in 1967 about the Michigan protests said that Wolf was “on the ground floor,” interviewed on TV and the press; one might say he was the public face and voice of those leading the protest. Subsequently, Jacobson and Wolf’s 1970 uncovering of anthropologists’ collaboration with the military during the U.S. bombing of Thailand, published in the New York Review of Books, remains a ‘case study’ that has anchored the history and teaching of ethics in anthropology discussed in the American Anthropological Association and anthropology texts. [57]

Eric Wolf’s career as a scholar-activist offers a comment on a long-standing cycle of debate in anthropology—that is, the extent to which anthropologists have been engaged in ethics and in the politics of the communities they study increasingly in a collaborative manner. Activism and engagement on behalf of community interests has spread across all subdisciplines of anthropology in recent decades and ‘public anthropology has become an umbrella term for a range of engagement, from individual to collective action. [58] Sidney Mintz was asked in a videotaped interview who had the greatest influence on his research career. Mintz considered Karl Marx and early Russian Marxist theorist, Georgi Plekhanov. But, he concluded, Eric Wolf had been his greatest influence because of his understanding of “the relation between philosophy and action ….” [59] That link between philosophy and action framed his brief time in Charlottesville and I have sought in this essay to add this chapter to what has been written about Wolf’s career, underscoring his personal ethics and courage.

Postscript, Charlottesville 2017

The young man who had been a refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe sought in his last years to use his commitment to comparative study in anthropology to seek some explanation for the rise, violence and spread of National Socialism. [60] We find that explicitly stated in Wolf’s introduction to his last book, Envisioning Power:
This inquiry focuses on the ideas that guided the paroxysm of events. The German catastrophe was of course the vortex of other catastrophes: Jewish, French, Gypsy, Polish and Russian, to name but a few way stations on the descent into hell. What the National Socialists wrought is, without a doubt, a cause of moral outrage, but outrage is not enough. It is vital that we gain an analytic purchase on what transpired, precisely because it embodied a possibility for humankind, and what was humanly possible can happen again. [61]

“Charlottesville” is today a trope for the current surge in threatened and real violence of alt-right, white supremacist and antisemitic groups uniting in public displays and on the internet, a surge encouraged by the former president of the United States. “Charlottesville” refers as well to the resistance those Nazi groups were met with in Charlottesville and by the community including faculty, staff and students on the UVa campus in August 2017. The confused and tepid response to the violence by city, state and university administrators, and police, and Donald Trump’s statement that there were ‘good and bad people on both sides’ will not soon, if ever, be forgotten.
Those days of six years ago were traumatic to Charlottesville and the nation. The real local effect was to cause UVa and the city to confront the legacy of its Jim Crow past and continuing racism and segregation. Many Black residents after the violence and the inaction of the police to protect counter-protestors responded with reference to the centuries of violence and oppression their community had suffered, for which there had been no local or national outrage. And, as Eric Wolf witnessed and spoke out against in the 1950s, not only was there no local or national outrage directed against the systemic racism of the time, but the state had encouraged or malevolently ignored the effects of that ongoing racism. Superintendent of schools, Dr. Rosa Atkins, told the New York Times, “I don’t think the hate groups selected our community by chance. [62] University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan advised students, faculty, and staff to avoid the Nazi demonstration. Many followed that advice, while others responded with a counter-protest and eventual legal aid.
There is no direct legacy that links Wolf’s actions in the 1950s to the counter-protests of 2017. The present here is very different than the past and the present in the 1950s was disturbingly (and by design) tragically very different than Anthropology of its own time. However, that anthropological scholar-activism, public anthropology and humanism have become widely accepted in the discipline, from faculty to undergraduate students, and are a value of our academic community, was apparent in the 2017 Anthropology department and University that Wolf had been so isolated in during the late 1950s. In 2017, University of Virginia students, including many Anthropology graduate students, were among the counter protesters. [63] Anthropology professor Ira Bashkow published an essay critical of former UVa President Sullivan’s inaction in a 2017 issue of Sapiens. [64] A book of essays by UVa faculty and community members and published by the University of Virginia Press is entitled Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity. [65] The authors in the volume invoke deep local race history of white supremacy by the city and the university as the very source of the continuing Jim Crow ideology that still looms large today in the city that Nazis marched in.

One can only imagine how distraught Eric Wolf would have been on seeing the Nazi swastika flag and the torch-carrying white supremacists march across the university campus and into the city of Charlottesville. Yet, he had predicted that possibility and might have been heartened to see faculty and students opposing the white supremacists and publicly bemoaning the state’s slow and ineffective response. I believe he would have understood that continuing tensions in Charlottesville are not about National Socialism and its acceptance in certain parts of the United States. Wolf would have understood, as many do today, that the tensions in Charlottesville are about a more local and specific history of power and inequality: the continuing legacy of racism that Wolf had written to Mintz about in 1958; the shock of most white students and faculty finding they had little power to control the poorly organized lethal Nazi sympathizers; the shock of that same group that they could not rely on the power of the state—from the university to the police to the governor’s office—to protect them and confront the Nazis; and the shock of that same group to the predominant response of African American residents in Charlottesville that said ‘this is the violence we face here, and have faced here, everyday’, and THAT is the inequality, the violence and the limited access to power that we must confront more directly and work to change.
Wolf spoke to that issue as a public anthropologist in the 1950s at a time when public anthropology is considered to have been in decline, when there were not many public anthropologists in the discipline and only four UVa faculty across all disciplines and the university hospital and law school, that joined him. It is a moment early in his career as scholar-activist that deserves attention in his remarkable life.

Archival Sources

Eric Wolf papers, Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan.

Sidney Mintz papers, Sheridan Library Special Collections, Johns Hopkins University.

FBI files

Floyd Nelson House Papers, 1919-1974, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

FBI files, Highlander Folk School, Part 2 of 19, Agent notes, October 31, 1941. https://vault.fbi.gov/Highlander%20Folk%20School/Highlander%20Folk%20School%20Part%201%20of%2019/view

Selected Bibliography

Gledhill, John. 1999. “Eric Wolf: An Appreciation.” Critique of Anthropology 19: 202–208.

Hancock, Robert L.A. 2011. “Eric Wolf and the Structural Power of Theory,” Histories of Anthropology Annual, 7: 191–215. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Heyman, Josiah McC. 2005. “Eric Wolf’s Ethical-political Humanism, and Beyond,” Critique of Anthropology 25: 13–25.

Heyman, Josiah McC. 2012. “Eric R. Wolf,” Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, John L. Jackson, ed. New York: Oxford University Press. http://oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0042.xml.

Kottak, Conrad Phillip. 2012. “Eric Robert Wolf, 1923-1999: A Biographical Memoir.” Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/wolf-eric.pdf.

Schneider, Jane and Rayna Rapp. 1995. “Works by Eric R. Wolf,” in Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf, ed. by Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, pp. 351–356. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolf, Eric R. 1999. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press. (with contributions by Sydel Silverman and Aram Yengoyan)

Wolf, Eric R. 2001. “Introduction: An Intellectual Biography,” In: Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World, ed. by Eric R. Wolf, Sydel Silverman, and Aram Yengoyan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolf, 2001, Eric R. Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World, ed. by Eric R. Wolf, Sydel Silverman, and Aram Yengoyan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

References Cited

Arndt, Grant. 2019. “Rediscovering Nancy Ostreich Lurie’s Activist Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 121:725-728

Bashkow, Ira. 2017. “Three Lessons I Learned From Charlottesville,” Sapiens, Oct. 13, 2017.

Boyle, Sarah Patton. 1962. The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Carson, Clayborne, et al. 1978. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Desegregation and the Future,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 3, Birth of a New Age, Dec. 1955–Dec 1956, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ely, Carol, Jeffrey L. Hantman & Phyllis Leffler. 1994. To Seek the Peace of the City, Exhibit catalog https://explore.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/show/seek

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Friedman, Jonathan. 1987. “Interview with Eric Wolf,” Current Anthropology 28:107–18.

Ghani, Ashraf. 1987. “A Conversation with Eric Wolf,” American Ethnologist 14: 346–367.

Gledhill, John. 1999. “Eric Wolf: An Appreciation,” Critique of Anthropology 19: 202–208.

Glen, John M. 1996. Highlander: No Ordinary School, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Green, Erica L. & Annie Waldman. 2018. “You Are Still Black: Charlottesville’s Racial Divide Hinders Students,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 2018.

Hancock, Robert L.A. 2011. “Eric Wolf and the Structural Power of Theory,” Histories of Anthropology Annual, 7: 191-215, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Hantman, Jeffrey L. 2019.“Eugenicists, Sentimentalists, Activists: Social Theory at the University of Virginia, 1926-1960”. Magazine of Albemarle County History 76-77:71–100.

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Jorgensen, Joseph G. & Eric R. Wolf. 1970. “Anthropologists on the warpath in Thailand.” New York Review of Books, November 19, 26–35

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Leffler, Phyllis. 2018. “Insiders or Outsiders: Charlottesville’s Jews, White Supremacy and Antisemitism,” Southern Jewish History 21 (2018): 61–120.

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King, Jr., Martin Luther. 1956. “Desegregation and the Future,” in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1978, ed. Clayborne Carson et al., vol. 3, Birth of a New Age, Dec. 1955–Dec 1956, Berkeley: University of California Press,), p. 475.

McBea, Susanna. 1958. “University Remote from School Furor,” Washington Post, City Life, September 22, p. B1.

McC. Heyman Josiah. 2005. “Eric Wolf’s Ethical-political Humanism, and Beyond,” Critique of Anthropology 25: 13–25.

McC. Heyman, Josiah. 2010. “Activism in Anthropology: Exploring the Present Through Eric R. Wolf’s Vietnam-era Work,” Anthropology 34: 287–293.

Marcus, Anthony. 1989. “Eric Wolf Obituary,” Solidarity.

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Inequity, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Palerm, Juan-Vicente. 2014. “Recordando a Eric Wolf,” Desacatos 46: 179–186.

Powdermaker, Hortense. 1944. Probing Our Prejudices: A Unit for High School Students, New York; London: Harper & Brothers.

Powdermaker, Hortense. 1939. After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. New York: Viking.

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