Arthur Wolf

1932 - 2015

Arthur Paul Wolf

March 2, 1932 - May 2, 2015

Arthur Paul Wolf died in his 84th year, at home, comforted by affectionate visits and letters from kin, friends, colleagues, and students across the world. Only child of the late Paul and Emily Wolf of Santa Rosa, as a teenager he worked on his family ranch, at logging in the nearby woods, and in an Alaska mine. His academic career began with a Doyle Scholarship at Santa Rosa Junior College and continued on a Telluride Fellowship (for promising students who had worked with their hands) to Cornell University. After earning a Ph.D. at Cornell, he taught in their Anthropology Department until 1969, then joined the faculty at Stanford. He ended his career in Stanford's David and Lucile Packard Chair of Human Biology. His remarkable teaching is warmly remembered by his many students. Years at The London School of Economics, Oxford University, and The University of Cambridge were interspersed with anthropology fieldwork in Taiwan and China and cooperative research with his first wife, Margery Jones Wolf, and scholars at Academia Sinica (Taiwan), Xiamen University (China), and Radbout University (The Netherlands).
Arthur believed with real passion that it is better to produce than to consume, and gave short shrift to people who lived otherwise. His attachment to this principle is shown by his fifty years of contributions to the study of human nature; by publishing a last book in the year before he died; and, also late in life, by building a handsome house with his own hands--from felling trees for lumber to choosing upholstery fabrics for furniture. Saltlick House will be the core of his Rockpile Foundation, meant to help scholars in this time of academic constriction. He will be sorely missed by his wife, Hill Gates, and many others, for his honesty, his wit, and his fine prose style.