An Interview with Eric Wolf

Abstract

W: I suppose I've always wanted to find out why there are so many different kinds of people in the world with different cultures, partly because my own family came from such very different places and backgrounds. I was bom in Vienna. My father was an Austrian and had travelled before World War I in Latin America, and then in the war he was captured by the Russians and sent to the outer limits of Siberia, Irkutsk, a prisoner-ofwar camp, and there met my mother's brother, who was in the Russian army and who wanted to learn English. My father pretended that he could teach him English, so he was let out of the stockade periodically to go and visit Uncle Joe, and Uncle Joe then took him home, and that's where he met my mother. Now, they had gone to Siberia after fleeing from European Russia in the I905 revolution and going to France. My grandfather was later allowed to go back, but to the Mongol-Chinese-Russian border, and so that's where they were settled at the time. I grew up, at least in the early childhood years, with all these reference points-Latin America, Harbin in Manchuria, my grandfather's house, all the stories about the war, where people had been. One of my father's friends was an architect who had been a prisoner of war in Turkmenistan and was a great lover of yurts. He made detailed drawings of them.... I spent a lot of time with him, and visiting museums.