Resumen de Elusive Relations: Distant, Intimate, and Hostile
A revised version of the tenth Eric Wolf Lecture, given in Vienna in November 2015, this article works with three interlocking elements of Wolf�s research agenda: historical ethnography conducted across interlocking scales with a view to exposing the different fields through which power operates. I use two moments in my own research. The first serves to characterize Wolf�s research framework as a lens through which to expose those social relations of particular interest for a critique of capitalist society at the time he was writing. The second is then used to suggest possible extensions of Wolf�s work for a similar agenda in the present. Characteristics of the 1970s and 2010s are distinguished, on the one hand, for the society of capital and, on the other, for people who identify themselves with the community of Huasicancha in the central highlands of Peru. Such a historical ethnography is thereby employed to reveal shifts in the interlocking scales of social relations alongside changes in fields of power.
