Not sure if this already made it to pen-l, anyways he it is. From: Harald E.L. Prins, Kansas State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] In response some queries about "Who was Eric Wolf," I offer the following sketch. Son of an Austrian soldier who became POW in Siberia during WWI, and a Russian woman exiled with her family in the same area, Eric was born in Vienna in 1922. Eric's youth was decidedly multicultural. Not only did he hear about Latin America from his father who had traveled there for business before the War, but from his mother he heard fascinating tales about her own father who had lived not only among Russians, but also Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and even Siberian Tungus. And although Eric grew up in the city, he spent his summers in the Alps where he became intrigued by local peasants dressed in exotic costumes and speaking local dialects. In 1933, the year that the Nazis came to power in Germany, Eric's family went to Sudetenland (now Czech Republic) where his father had been appointed manager of a textile factory. He not only read the usual German classics, but also Karl May's fascinating adventure stories of the American Wild West and the Arabian Desert. In 1938, his father saw the Nazi writing on the wall and sent his sixteen-year old son to England where he finished high school. However, having declared war against Germany after the invasion of Poland, the English considered Eric a foreigner belonging to an enemy nation and sent him to an alien internment camp north of Liverpool. That is where he met other Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, including Norbert Elias (who had just published his magnum opus "Ueber den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und Psychogenetische Untersuchungen" in Basel, a magnificent work which only decades later was translated into English). In that camp, Eric also had his first serious encounters with Marxist theory. Because he had family in New York, he was allowed to leave England. In New York, he first studied biochemistry. Having taken a course in anthropology under Hortense Powdermaker (who had studied under Malinowski at the London School of Economics in the 1920s), Eric switched majors. In 1942, before completing his undergraduate degree, he enlisted in the 10th Mountain Division and fought in the Alps. Knowing that dangerous terrain well, he won a Silver Star for bravery in combat. After the war, he returned to the US and completed his Bachelor degree in 1946, and entered Columbia University on the GI Bill. Studying under Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict, he formed part of a brilliant cohort of graduate students (including Stanley Diamond, Sidney Mintz, Elman Service), all of whom veterans with socialist/communist leanings. For his doctoral research he went to study a coffee hacienda in Puerto Rico and completed his doctorate at Columbia in 1951. He followed Steward initially to the University of Illinois-Urbana, made fieldtrips to Mexico and wrote several important articles on peasants as well as a book titled "The Sons of Shaking Earth" (1959). After teaching stints at the University of Virginia, Yale University, and U Chicago, he became a professor at U Michigan. There he wrote a very important little book simply titled "Anthropology" (1964), and deepened his comparative historical interest in peasants. After a 1966 book titled Peasants, he published a famous study titled Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1969), which appeared during the height of the Vietnam War. He was firmly opposed to that war and organized the first teach-in against the war (with his friend and fellow anthropologist Marshall Sahlins). There had been none before, but there were many afterwards, also on other campuses in the country. He became also active within the American Anthropological Association, where he helped found the Committee on Ethics. In that capacity, he helped expose CIA-funded anthropological research in Thailand. In 1971, he accepted a distinguished professorship at Lehman College in the Bronx, where his anthropology classes were filled with working class students from Puerto Rico and other islands in the Caribbean. He was also member of the PhD Program at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where he continued to attract many outstanding students. Having published numerous other articles and several other books, including a seminal work titled "Europe and the People Without History" (1982), he received a MacArthur "genius" award in 1990. A year later, three scholarly sessions were organized at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, exploring the influence of Wolf's work on the field of anthropology. Out of these sessions came a volume, edited by two of Wolf's former students, Jane Schneider and Rayna Rapp, and titled "Articulating Hidden Histories: Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf" (U California Press, 1995). He was also honored by several major universities, including the University of Vienna and the University of Amsterdam, which granted him with honorary doctorates. A few years ago, he was first diagnosed with cancer. Yet, he found the energy to complete his last book "Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis" (U California Press, 1999), which he dedicated to the memory of the Catholic family in former Czechoslowakia which risked its own life to hide Eric's parents. Eric is survived by his wife and fellow anthropologist Sydel Silverman and two sons from an earlier marriage. But his enormous scholarly output in a dozen books and about one hundred articles and essays he has either authored or co-authored, edited or co-edited, does not represent the full measure of his exemplary life as a humanist. For that, I believe, one would have had to see and hear him in person. Still, this brief review should give some idea of a life very well lived. There will be an Eric R. Wolf Fund for Student Research at the Anthropology Program, The Graduate School, City University of New York (33 West 42nd Street, NY 10036). There will also be a memorial service for Eric.