Eric Wolf

An anthropologist whose 1982 book Europe and the People Without History argued against the era's Eurocentric histories, showing that societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas were active participants in global trade and political systems rather than isolated backwaters awaiting European contact. He brought Marxist analysis into anthropology through studies like Peasants and Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, and used his position at Columbia and CUNY to organize Vietnam War teach-ins and rewrite the American Anthropological Association's ethics code.