Vision and Method in Anthropology: Forty Years of Eric Wolf’s ‘Europe and the People Without History’
This workshop will inquire into anthropological vision and method forty years after “Europe and the People Without History”.
Main content
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. It was a book that in retrospect prepared the discipline brilliantly for the accelerating capitalist globalization that would mark the next fifty years.
This is an opportunity for anthropologists interested in a re-vitalized and updated Wolfian anthropology to get together and discourse about Wolf’s work.
Please find the abstracts using the link below.
Programme Friday
10.00: Opening remarks: 40 Years of EPWH - Don Kalb (University of Bergen) and Susana Narotzky (University of Barcelona).
Session 1: EPWH and the Politics of labor-class-race-life in the 21st century.
10.15: Sharryn Kasmir - The New Laborers: Revisiting Wolf’s Last Chapter 40 Years Hence.
Discussant: Stephen Campbell
11.00: Luisa Steur - Wolf’s Marxian analysis “out of the closet”
Discussant: Lesley Gill
11.45: Jeff Maskovsky - The United States and the People Without History
Discussant: Jorge Nunez
Lunch
Session 2: Ethnographic extensions
14.00: Patricia Alves de Matos - Eric Wolf’s Marxian approach to the labour process and the goal of explanation in anthropology: humans disguised as robots in call centre labour
Discussant: Nindish Sundar
14.45: Oana Mateescu - On the new plantations: European divisions of labor and knowledge
Discussant: Stephen Campbell
16.00: Susana Narotzky - People Without History: The Value of Worthlessness to Capitalism
Discussant: Sarah Winkler-Reid
16.45: Ariel Wilkis - “People without currency”: The popularization of the US dollar in Argentina from 1930 until the first decades of the XXI century
Discussant: Maka Suarez
17.30: Theodora Vetta - People without history, discipline without future
Discussant: Ida Susser
Programme Saturday
Session 3: The Question of Nature
9.30: Jaume Franquesa - Eric Wolf and the question of nature
Discussant: Marc Morell
10.15: Antonio Pusceddu - Connections and contradictions: Some thoughts on Eric Wolf’s political ecology
Discussant: Lesley Gill
Session 4: Modes of Production
11.15: Natalia Buier - Old questions for present predicaments: modes of production and the transition debate in Europe and the People Without History
Discussant: Marc Morell
12.00: Chris Hann - Eurasia and the People without Transcendence
Discussant: Ida Susser
Lunch
14.00: Jeremy Rainer - Making, Taking, and Relating: Modes of production in a polycentric world
Discussant: Maka Suarez
14.45: Patrick Neveling - Unfortunately, there are no histories of people without Europe: On the denial of imperialism in anthropology's neoliberal encounter
Discussant: Nindish Sundar
15.00: Don Kalb - Anthropology and Big History: Three Models
Discussant: Jorge Nunez
Discussion
16.00: Ida Susser, Lesley Gill, Stephen Campbell, Marc Morell
(ten minutes each; 50 minutes left for general discussion)
Closure at 17.30
Welcome!
