Eric Wolf Lectures

The international ERIC WOLF LECTURES are jointly organised by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna, the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the International Research Center for Cultural Studies IFK. 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.

17th Eric Wolf Lecture

Facing Power: Ethnographic Encounters in Indonesia’s Plantation Zone

by Tania Marray Li

25.03.2025
ÖAW Festsaal

In his 1990 Distinguished Lecture: Facing Power - Old Insights, New Questions, Eric Wolf set out ambitious parameters for studying power and explaining how it works. He made the case for anthropology as an explanatory discipline and drew on the theoretical repertoire of both Marx and Foucault in ways that resonate with my own research practice. In this lecture I build on Wolf’s work to outline the multiple formations of power that shape the conditions of life in Indonesia’s plantation zone. I then draw on ethnographic research to explore how these powers are encountered or “faced” by particular interlocutors, and the actions and reflections that follow.

Program