Transcending the barrierseric wolf beyond marx essays

Transcending the barrierseric wolf beyond marx essays Transcending the Barriers "My primary interest is to explain something out there that impinges me, and I would sell my soul to the devil if I thought it would help." Eric Wolf, 1987 Eric Wolf's interest into the realm of anthropology emerged upon recognition of the theorist- imposed boundaries, encompassing both theories and subjects, which current and past anthropological scholars had constructed. These boundaries, Wolf believed, were a result of theorist tending to societies and cultures as fixed entitiesstatic, bounded and autonomous, rather then describing and interpreting societies within a state of constant change, ceaselessly vulnerable to external influence, and always interconnected with other societies. Yet to transcend current anthropological theories and boundaries, and to explain this interconnectedness, in attempt to understand the world, Wolf believed three criteria must be met: 1) To trace the world market and the course of capitalist development, 2) To develop this t heory of this growth and development and finally, one must be able to relate both the history and theory of that unfolding development to processes that affect and change the lives of local populations Wolf, 1982:21) By tracing the formation of Wolf's theory through these criteria, from Marxist and beyond, one can see how, although Marxist in orientation, he goes beyond current anthropological theory and attempts to diminish the boundaries, by suggesting that a political economic theory laden with history in a macrocosomic context is the only means in which one can begin to attempt to understand the world. Capitalist Development The influence of Lewis Henry Morgon and his unilinear version of social evolution posed as the backbone for Karl Marx and Fred Engels. Yet rather then transcending from the primitive to the civilized upon "the classification of cultures into seven distinct ethical periods" based on the development of subsistence techniques (K...