Some Histories Are More Possible Than Others: Structural Power, Big Pictures and the Goal of Explanation in the Anthropology of Eric Wolf
Author(s)
Gledhill, John
Abstract
While there are elements of postmodernist and post-structuralist thought that Wolf either anticipated or incorporated happily into his own thinking, his realist epistemology remained radically opposed to the fashions that became dominant after the publication of Europe and the People without History. He insisted that the goal of a humanistic science was to explain rather than simply to interpret ‘experience-near’ phenomena, and that explanation was a viable goal provided anthropologists adopted agreed canons for formulating concepts and undertaking comparisons. He also saw the quest for explanation as a cumulative process, in which new developments incorporated insights from the past. This article argues that Wolf’s particular way of marrying historical and ethnographic research enabled him to produce an understanding of the development of the modern world that is quite different from the grand narratives that postmodernists reject but still enables us to grasp the ‘bigger picture’ of global history as movement and the force of structural power in local scenarios. Postmodernist and postcolonial theorizing has, in contrast, failed to grasp the historical conditions of its own production and the way our world has changed, offering social and political critiques readily defused or appropriated by today’s more ‘decentred’ hegemonic forces.
