The international ERIC WOLF LECTURES are jointly organised by the ISA, the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna, the International Research Center for Cultural Studies IFK and the Central European University (CEU). The lectures have been taking place every second year since 2002 and annually since 2008. The invitation to the Eric Wolf Lecture honours an anthropologist for special scientific accomplishments. At the same time, the lectures serve to constructively develop Eric Wolf’s legacy of a cosmopolitan and timely social and cultural anthropology. Eric Wolf (born 1923 in Vienna, died 1999 in New York), McArthur Prize laureate, member of the American Academy of Fine Arts and Sciences and Dr. h.c. of the University of Vienna, is considered one of the most outstanding anthropologists of the 20th century (Silverman in Gingrich, Fillitz & Musner 2007). Proceedings of the first Eric Wolf Lecture were published as a book in German (including, among other contributionss, the lecture held by Marshall Sahlins, an article by Eric Wolf and an article by Sydel Silverman on Eric Wolf’s work and life). Since 2004, the Eric Wolf Lectures are published in Current Anthropology, one of the most renowned anthropological journals. Since 2006 the Eric Wolf Lecture is followed by a small seminar at the IFK, giving an interested audience the chance to reflect and discuss the lecture with the invited researcher.

 

In cooperation with:

2025

17th Eric Wolf Lecture | Tania Murray Li

Facing Power: Ethnographic Encounters in Indonesia’s Plantation Zone
2023

16th Eric Wolf Lecture | Akhil Gupta

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Climate Change: Some Anthropological Questions
2022

15th Eric Wolf Lecture | Heike Behrend

Echos der Präsenz. Bemerkungen zur Geschichte der ethnografischen Feldforschung.
2021

14th Eric Wolf Lecture | Adriana Petryna

Horizon Work. At the edges of knowledge in an age of runaway climate change
2019

13th Eric Wolf Lecture | Didier Fassin

Of Plots and Men. The Heuristics of Conspiracy Theories.
2018

12th Eric Wolf Lecture | Arjun Appadurai

The future of the european englightenment in the age of globalization
2016

11th Eric Wolf Lecture | Anna L. Tsing

Others without History: Organisms as agility-shifting actors in the trajectory of capital
2015

10th Eric Wolf Lecture | Gavin Smith

Elusive Relations: Distant, Intimate and Hostile
2014

9th Eric Wolf Lecture | Ulf Hannerz

Writing Futures: An Anthropologist’s View of Global Scenarios
2013

8th Eric Wolf Lecture | Margaret Lock

Reassessing Embodiment in the Era of the Epigenome
2011

7th Eric Wolf Lecture | Vyjayanthi V. Rao

Slum cities or cities with slums in them?
2010

6th Eric Wolf Lecture | Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff

History and the People beyond Europe: A Counter-evolutionary Story?
2009

5th Eric Wolf Lecture | Aihwa Ong

“What Marco Polo Forgot”: Asian Projects Reconfigure the Global
2008

4th Eric Wolf Lecture | Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Rebuilding the ship at sea: An anthropologist's attempt to make sense of contemporary world history
2006

3rd Eric Wolf Lecture | Judith Okely

Ethnographic knowledge has the power to transform: it may also be ignored, blocked or misappropriated
2004

2nd Eric Wolf Lecture | Jane and Peter Schneider

Mafia, Antimafia, and the Plural Cultures of Sicily
2002

1st Eric Wolf Lecture | Marshall Sahlins

Anthropology, Culture, History