Eric Wolf viewed culture as a web of relations, constantly changing over time. Power on the endpoints of the relationships is unequal, so that European merchants, for example, altered political arrangements in West Africa by trading guns for slaves, but relationships are mutually causal, and change extends in both directions. Nor is this a matter […]
Anthropology Articles
Eric Robert Wolf
Eric Robert Wolf spent his professional career defining and expanding issues such as peasant society, state formation, development of capitalism, and colonial expansion. He worked extensively to unite political anthropology, economic anthropology, and historical sociology. He worked with the Marxist concept of modes of production as a conceptual tool in studying the historical and materialist […]
Witchcraft
The term witchcraft is used in a great number of ways, to refer to supernatural beliefs and practices that the user considers evil or dangerous. Some of its many meanings are confusing, and its use is frequently pejorative, and unless it is carefully defined by its user it can be quite misleading. But it is […]
Witch Doctor
Witch doctor, also sometimes witchman, is an unfortunate term created by English speakers during colonial times in Africa to refer originally to healers using supernatural means, but it became a generic term for any sort of traditional healer anywhere, regardless of what methods were employed or what affliction was treated. It reflects a time when […]
Clark Wissler
Clark Wissler was an influential American anthropologist, although his impact on anthropological theory is often overlooked. Many of Wissler’s ideas on culture area, culture pattern, universal culture pattern, and age and area distribution of cultural traits are still in use by anthropologists today. However, Wissler is rarely cited for his contributions to these theories. While […]