anthropologia

Here’s a quote from Wolf’s 1982 book that remains applicable in so many ways here in 2026. You just need to update some of the names that have been turned into things and subsequently turned into targets of war (although in many ways the names, things, and targets of war remain largely the same):

By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other line so many hard and round billiard balls. This it becomes easy to sort the world into differently colored balls, to declare that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” In this way a quintessential West is counterposed to an equally quintessential East, where life was cheap and slavish multitudes groveled under a variety of despotisms. Later, as peoples in other climes began to assert their political and economic independence from both West and East, we assigned these new applicants for historical status to a Third World of underdevelopment–a residual category of conceptual billiard balls–as contrasted with the developed West and the developing East. Inevitably, perhaps, these refined categories became intellectual instruments in the prosecution of the Cold War. There was the “modern” world of the West. There was the world of the East, which had fallen prey to communism, a “disease of modernization” (Rostow 1960). There was, finally, the Third World, still bound up in ‘tradition’ and strangled in its efforts toward modernization. If the West could only find ways to break that grip, it could perhaps save the victim from the infection incubated and spread by the East, and set that Third World upon the road to modernization–the road to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the West. The ghastly offspring of this way of thinking about the world was the theory of “forced draft urbanization” (Huntington 1968:655), which held that the Vietnamese could be propelled toward modernization by driving them into the cities through aerial bombardment and defoliation of the countryside. Names thus become things, and things marked with an X can become targets of war.

Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (1982: 6-7).

Note on Wolf’s references: The Rostow 1960 reference is Walt Whitman Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. The Huntington reference is Samuel Huntington’s 1968 piece in Foreign Affairs called “The Bases of Accommodation.”