Articulating Hidden Histories

Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf

Jane Schneider, Rayna Rapp, Jane Schneider, Rayna Rapp

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520085824
• eBook ISBN: 9780520342774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

With his groundbreaking Europe and the People Without History, Eric R. Wolf powerfully advanced the project of integrating the disciplines of anthropology and history. In Articulating Hidden Histories, many of those influenced by Wolf—both anthropologists and historians—acknowledge the contribution of this great scholar while extending his work by presenting their own original field and archival research.

The "hidden histories" referred to here encompass the histories of economic and political forces capable of dislodging people from their surroundings, of the people thus dislocated, and of the anthropological concepts developed to understand such processes. Within this framework, the contributors explore an extraordinarily wide range of topics, from the invention of tribalism in colonial West Africa to the ecological activism of North American housewives.

This collection offers a fitting tribute not only to Eric Wolf's work, but to its continuing influence on the fields of anthropology and history.


With his groundbreaking Europe and the People Without History, Eric R. Wolf powerfully advanced the project of integrating the disciplines of anthropology and history. In Articulating Hidden Histories, many of those influenced by Wolf—both a

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ONE Introduction: The Analytic Strategies of Eric R. Wolf
• TWO Writing a History of Power: An Examination of Eric R. Wolf’s Anthropological Quest
• THREE The Cultural History of Peasantries
• FOUR Capital, Ritual, and Boundaries of the Closed Corporate Community
• FIVE Conacre: A Reevaluation of Irish Custom
• SIX The Prussian Junker and Their Peasants: Articulations with Kinship of a Tribute-taking Class
• SEVEN Prefigurations of the Vietnamese Revolution
• EIGHT From Jíbaro to Crack Dealer: Confronting the Restructuring of Capitalism in El Barrio
• NINE The Great Bambi War: Tocquevillians versus Keynesians in an Upstate New York County
• TEN In the Shadow of the Smokestacks: Labor and Environmental Conflict in a Company-dominated Town
• ELEVEN Risky Business: Genetic Counseling in a Shifting World
• TWELVE From Trash to Treasure: Housewife Activists and the Environmental Justice Movement
• THIRTEEN Structuring the Consciousness of Resistance: State Power, Regional Conflict, and Political Culture in Contemporary Peru
• FOURTEEN Notes toward an Ethnography of a Transforming State: Romania, 1991
• FIFTEEN The Timely Significance of Supernatural Mothers or Exemplary Daughters: The Metonymy of Identity in History
• SIXTEEN Being a Good Swede: National Identity as a Cultural Battleground
• SEVENTEEN Cultural Dis-Integration and the Invention of New Peace-Fares
• EIGHTEEN The Reconstruction of “Tradition” and the Defense of the Colonial Order: British West Africa in the Early Twentieth Century
• NINETEEN Who Were the Bushmen?Historical Process in the Creation of an Ethnic Construct
• TWENTY Amazonian Windows to the Past: Recovering Women’s Histories from the Ecuadorean Upper Amazon
• TWENTY-ONE Ethnic Segmentation of the Labor Market and the “Work Site Animal”: Fragmentation and Reconstruction of Identities within the World System
• WORKS BY ERIC R. WOLF
• REFERENCES
• CONTRIBUTORS