Power, Culture, and History: The Legacies of Wolf, Sahlins, and Fabian

Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. By Eric Wolf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 483 pp., index, 1 black-and-white photo. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Culture in Practice: Collected Essays. By Marshall David Sahlins (New York: Zone, 2000. 640 pp., index, 6 black-and-white illustrations. $35.00 cloth.)

Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays. By Johannes Fabian (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. 256 pp., index. $45.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.)

Although the term legacy may be judged premature, the recent death of Eric Wolf is a reminder of the evanescence of our lives and works and so is also an opportunity to take stock of the influence that a selection of the senior generation of anthropologists has exerted on the intellectual architecture of anthropology.

Eric Wolf was a central figure in the history of twentieth-century anthropology as well as a personal witness to some of that century's key events, such as the Nazi regime in Germany, which forced him to emigrate in the early 1940s. Such a personal history seems to relate directly to his lifelong interests in power and history. Moreover, Wolf's insistence on the enduring connections between society, culture, power, and history marked out his work as displaying not only a European sensibility to Marxist thinking, but also an American interest in the political consequences of the cultural exercise of power. As I will suggest later, this agenda is also present in the work of both Marshall Sahlins and Johannes Fabian, suggesting that it is the interplay of those traditions, not their opposition, that has been a part of the intellectual vigor of all three authors.

Wolf's was an anthropology of profound political engagement, reflecting his insight that too great a degree of particular ethnographic description might lead to a failure to offer some kind of explanation, and that explanation was more politically relevant than an aesthetic interpretation. Different readers will find different moments of this outstanding academic career more or less relevant than others. For my own part, and no doubt for other readers of this particular journal, the general call to arms that was implied in the very title of "Europe and the People without History" was both intellectually liberating and a reason to risk the kind of anthropological research that has only now become acceptable.

It is hard now to reconstruct the insistence with which the possibility of recovering the historical was denied within ethnographic practice and the extent to which Malinowskian ethnographic practice was itself conflated with the anthropological project overall. The estrangement of both archaeology and biology from anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s could be seen as a direct result of this overemphasis on ethnographic representation and its angst.

The work falls into six chapters, beginning with an account of Wolf's own intellectual development and the rationale for the book, which was only completed in the last stages of his battle with cancer. He then goes on to look at the key concept of power and how it has emerged in Western discourse since the Enlightenment. This allows him to show how anthropology itself has directly inherited, and attempted to apply as basic research concepts, those ideas that were already fashioned by the Enlightenment.

This then sets the stage for a more critical enquiry into the nature of society and culture. Here Wolf's Marxist interests in the power relations of economy and society combine with a Weberian insistence on the importance of ideology, somewhat in the manner of Gramsci. In practical terms this means that anthropology must comprise both the local and the global in its explanations of the particular—a prophetic and still-relevant observation. Such an interest in theorizing the quotidian and ethnographically grounding the theoretical in everyday lives and local contexts thus announces an anthropological program that has appeared consistently in his work.

Wolf then goes...