Focaal

Europe and the people without history (EPWH), published in 1982, challenged anthropology's focus on localism, synchronism, and culturalism, providing a meticulous exposition of multiscalar social relationships in motion. Wolf's bundles of “key relationships” of accumulation and social reproduction formed a breakthrough for holistic relational and realist modes of explanation. Wolf's vision remains essential in capturing capitalism's ongoing uneven and combined concoctions. This theme section revisits EPWH's immanent possibilities – cut short by the “cultural turn” – through critical engagement with Wolf's intellectual toolkit and particularly by building on his analysis as practiced in EPWH. It thereby extends Wolf's vision to questions of political ecology, debt and financialization, hidden histories of class struggle, the contradictory unity of theory and practice, and “planning” as a distinct logic of organizing value.

Eric Wolf is conventionally credited with reframing the term “political ecology” through the lens of political economy in the early 1970s. However, he never engaged with what by the 1980s was already a growing transdisciplinary field. An inspiring book in the genealogy of political ecology, Europe and the people without history said little about the emerging approach. Nevertheless, I argue that despite its limited focus on ecological issues, the book's vision and method can still provide insights for envisioning an anthropologically minded political ecology of value that combines the heuristic skills of ethnographic research with the systemic analysis of global capitalist-driven environmental change. To this end, the article brings Wolf's strategic use of Marxian frameworks into conversation with the Marxian ecological critique of value.

In Wolf's EPWH, the importance of debt for scaffolding the expansion of the capitalist mode of production was shown repeatedly, despite not being treated as a distinct phenomenon. In the forty years that have gone by since the publication of the book, financial debt has gained centrality in global accumulation processes. The advancing frontier of financialization, reminiscent of that of earlier capitalist expansion, as well as its effects on particular groups and localities, has been a recurrent object of analysis in recent anthropological scholarship, often with a focus on the sphere of circulation and consumption. This article contends that the Wolfian conceptual toolkit, and particularly the notion of labor, should be brought back into the equation for addressing debt and credit relations in contemporary times.

In order to cast light on the limits and merits of Wolf's recourse to the concept of mode of production, I set up a dialogue between Europe and the people without history and the roughly contemporary intervention known as the “Brenner debate.” Wolf provides a mode of production solution and Brenner provides a class struggle solution to envisioning historical process. To explore the analytical strength of bringing Brenner to bear upon Wolf, an analysis of entangled agro-industrial crises in the Spanish province of Huelva is presented. A Wolfian framework, augmented by Brenner's focus on class struggle, reveals how the appropriation of nature and the exploitation of labor are conjoined and reinstates agricultural wage labor in its central position in the reproduction of the regional agricultural model.

This article explores Wolf's insistence in EPHW that he was practicing “Marxian” rather than Marxist anthropology. It presents the reasons for Wolf's distancing from “Marxism” and discusses to what extent these remain relevant today. It then moves to offer suggestions on working more explicitly toward the “contradictory unity of theory and practice” that characterizes any good scholarship drawing on Marx—including Wolf's. Finally, I discuss instances in my own work of trying to move within a Marxian/Marxist dialectic: the way I employed a Wolfian analysis to contribute insights of use to a broader politics of labor and formulate an immanent critique of existing Marxist practices. The article ends by presenting radical inspiration from one of my Marxist-Ambedkarite interlocutors in Kerala.

I take up the “modes of production” presented by Eric Wolf in Europe and the people without history as a set of tools for broad, systemic, and critical thinking about diversity and change in economic and political organization, including the changing forms of capitalist accumulation and the sources, and limits, of capital's planetary preponderance. I argue that Wolf's analysis centers problematics of “making,” “taking,” and “relating” that are necessary to critically assess how our collective capacities to create and destroy are mobilized, directed, and appropriated within and across polities, institutions, and circuits of value. I further argue for the importance of a fourth problematic, “planning,” highlighting the crucial political questions raised by the purposeful allocation of time, energy, and resources, as both actuality and potentiality.

It is time for anthropology to reclaim truth and speak it to capitalist power more forcefully. The rise of post-truth and the truth of our planetary socioecological predicaments demand this. How to do so is not straightforward. Recalibrating deconstruction and finding a new balance between epistemic solidities and shifting sands is only part of the task. The greater anthropological challenge is reorienting ethnography from frictions (how “global connections” fragment) to tensions (how and why contradictory global connections came about and endure or not). To explore this reorientation, I propose a political ecology of truth and the cultivation of a planetary ethnography. Both aspire to do anthropological justice to the dramatic transformations in our dominant planetary consciousness and the contradictory socioecological predicaments this is mired in.