Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World (review)

With his slight lisp, subtle smile, diffident manner, and profound thoughtfulness, Wolf did not command scenes that he entered like a prophet or a potentate. He did not coin slogans, spin out vast theoretical webs, or paint vivid ethnographic portraits. Only after reflecting on what he said did we who knew him recognize how powerful an analytical mind he deployed. Pathways of Power collects Wolf's major public statements on anthropological questions-except for those that appeared in such classic books as Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, 1982) and The Hidden Frontier (New York, 1974)-frames them with Wolf's brief retrospective comments on each piece and group of pieces, complements them with Wolf's ten-page intellectual autobiography, and adds both a twelve-page appreciation of Wolf's work by Aram Yengoyan and a preface by Silverman, who completed the book's editing after Wolf's death in 1999.

Of the twenty-eight essays reprinted in the book, twenty appeared in English-language publications (many of them fugitive), two appeared only in non-English versions, and six reach publication here for the first time. Wolf grouped his essays into four categories: Anthropology (attempts to situate both the profession and particular figures within Wolf's own experience of the profession), Connections (relations between local and large-scale social processes), Peasants (explorations-generally based more directly on Wolf's own fieldwork than other essays in the collection-of how rural cultivators live, work, and connect with others), and Concepts (more general reflections on culture, society, modes of production, and power). As a graduate student, by his own account, Wolf drew inspiration for a Marxist (or at least marxisant) anthropology from the major treatises of Wittfogel, Sweezy, and James.¹ Although he does not say so directly, he also assumed from the start that any valid anthropology would be deeply historical-meaning that it would locate its descriptions and explanations, including those of present-day processes, firmly in time and space.

Early in his career, Wolf's preference for material explanations and historical perspectives brought him to reject two influential approaches with which he had extensive contact: Steward's a historical cultural ecology and Kroeber's suprahistorical natural history.² Echoes of those early encounters reverberate throughout the book. More than anything else, Wolf insisted on tracing human practices and institutions to relations among social sites; on emphasizing relations of power, exploitation, and conflict; and finally on placing every human social arrangement that he analyzed in comparative-historical perspective.

Although Wolf distrusted grand theory from early on, these rich essays display a consummate theorist at work. Better yet, as Pathways of Power demonstrates in detail, this superb analyst of social processes never stopped challenging and rethinking his own smart, distinctive, and far-reaching formulations.