Alvin W. Wolfe
Distinguished University Professor Emeritus
Department of
Anthropology
University of South Florida
4202 E. Fowler Avenue, SOC 107
Tampa, FL 33620
Office Phone: (813) 974-0794
Email: wolfe@usf.edu
Education:
Alvin W. Wolfe is
Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, Anthropology, USF.. He was Director of the Center for Applied Anthropology at
USF from 1978-2002. He has been president of several national/international
professional associations: the Society for Applied Anthropology (1978-79), the
Society for Urban Anthropology (1985-86), the Southern Anthropological Society
(1991-92). Professor Wolfe was coordinator of the International Network of
Social Network Analysts and editor of that society's journal, CONNECTIONS (1988-93). Together
with H. Russell Bernard, he was the founder of the International Sunbelt Social
Network Conference, and co-organizer of most of its annual conferences
(1981-1993). He was the founding editor of CITY
& SOCIETY (1987-1991), the journal of the Society for Urban
Anthropology (AAA). He has served as secretary of the American Ethnological
Society and of the Society for Applied Anthropology.
Professor Wolfe served
for nine years (1985-1994) as Director of Graduate Programs in Applied
Anthropology. He taught Methods in Applied Anthropology and Applications of
Network Models, and supervised the graduate work of doctoral and master's
students. Through his role as coordinator of internships Professor Wolfe had
significant involvement not only in the instructional program of the univeristy but also in service to the Tampa Bay area
community. Some of those service projects that students have accomplished in
past years include: Research and planning projects relevant to the USF area
neighborhood and community (in conjunction with the USF Planning Commission,
Institute on Government, and the Community Outreach Partnership Center),
projects for the Children's Board, projects planning transportation for the
disadvantaged, and others directed towards improving health and medical
services for the elderly. Dr. Wolfe was a member of the Health and Human
Services Board, District 6, was chair of that board 1997-1998, and chaired the
Statewide Health and Human Services Board in 1999. He has worked with Red Cross
Disaster Services since 1981, having chaired the Disaster Committee for some
years. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of two Florida
nonprofit agencies: the Central Florida Behavioral Health Network and the Florida
Institute for Community Studies.
Research:
Although his research
interests have come to focus on networks applied to various levels of
integration -- on health and human services systems and welfare reform, and on
the evolution of supranational systems composed of multinational corporations
and states –Professor Wolfe’s earlier
research was on traditional African cultures. His first book and a number of
articles were in that area:
1961 In the Ngombe Tradition: Continuity and Change in the
Congo (Northwestern University
Press, 1961).
1955 "Art
and the Supernatural in the Ubangi District," Man, LV, 76, London.
1959 "Man's
Relation to Man in Africa," American
Anthropologist, 61:606-614.
1969 "Social
Structural Bases of Art," Current Anthropology, Vol 10, No. 1, p. 3-44.
In the 1960s, after disappointing
attempts to publicize the U.S. role in preventing the spread of postcolonial
freedom through Congo into southern Africa, Professor Wolfe’s interests turned
to urban problems in America. An example of that work is his study of adaptations
to poverty by families in St. Louis, Missouri that began to develop team
methods for ethnographic research ( The
Soulard Area Adaptations to Poverty by
Urban White Families, Washington University Social Science
Research Institute, 1968).
Those experiences, on
top of his earlier interest in the networks of mining corporations in Africa,
led to what became a lifelong interest in the application of network models to
complex urban societies. After some years at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee,
Professor Wolfe got National Science Foundation support for “A Network Approach
to Levels of Integration," a study of a network of some 600 agencies and
organizations that serve children and families in the Tampa Bay area of Florida.
That work was intended to improve our methods of describing and studying urban
metropolitan areas, using network models and what he saw as a new form of
participant observation. The project used a relational data base management system
called the Human Services Information System, originally designed by Professor
Wolfe primarily to help planners and evaluators such as applied anthropology
interns training in these fields..
During twenty-some years
as Graduate Director and Coordinator of Internships at the University of South
Florida Professor Wolfe wrote a number of papers on the subject of graduate
education in applied anthropology, including a chapter, "General Placement
Issues," in Anthropology Tomorrow: Creating
Practitioner-Oriented Applied Anthropology Programs (1988),
"Internships and Practica in Applied
Anthropology" (Southern
Anthropologist, 1991), and "Twenty Years of Internships"
(SfAA Annual Meeting, 1994).With Professor Gilbert Kushner, then chair of the
Applied Anthropology Department at USF, Wolfe edited a collection of papers,
"Internship and Practice in Applied Anthropology" (Practicing Anthropology, 1993).
Wolfe’s papers on
network analysis applied to other topics include:
1970 "On
Structural Comparisons of Networks," Canadian Review of Sociology and
Anthropology, Vol 7, No. 4, pp. 226-244 (With the
assistance of Fred Schenk).
1977 "The
Supranational Organization of Production," Current Anthropology,
Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 615-636.
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=ant_facpub
1978 "The
Rise of Network Thinking in Anthropology," Social Networks,
1(1978):53-64.
1978 " How
It All Began," Practicing Anthropology, 1(4):3,19-20.
1980 "Applications
of network models to drug abuse treatment programs," Connections,
Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 28-29.
1980 "Multinational
enterprise and urbanism." In Thomas W. Collins, ed., Cities in a Larger Context.
Proceedings of the 14th Annual Meeting of the Southern
Anthropological Society. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press. Pp.
76-96.
1981 "Stress,
social support, and schizophrenia: A discussion." Schizophrenia
Bulletin 7(1) 173-177.
1982 "Internships
in Applied Anthropology: Evaluation After Five Years," Practicing
Anthropology 4(3,4): 12-13.
1982 Sociocultural
integration above the level of the state. Cultural Futures Research
7(1): 9-16, 22.
1986 "The
Multinational Corporation as a Form of Sociocultural Integration above the
Level of the State." In Hendrick Serrie, Ed., Anthropology
and International Business. Studies in Third World Societies,
Publication Number Twenty-Eight. Williamsburg, Va.: College of William and
Mary.
1987 "Editorial,"
City & Society 1(1): 3-5.
2000 Tangled
Webs of Work, Childcare and Transportation. Practicing
Anthropology, 22(1):40-43. (with Jennifer
Hardin and Ruth Ott.)
<
http://www.metapress.com/content/5q4860x0156g5518/fulltext.pdf>
2000 Welfare
Reform: Self-Sufficiency or What? IN Aaron Podalefsky
and Peter J. Brown, eds. Applying Anthropology: An Introductory Reader.
Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, Pp. 361-364. (Reprinted
from Practicing Anthropology, 2000).
2002 Developing
an Electronic Ethnography. IN Michael Angrosino, ed. Doing
Cultural Anthropology. Prospect Heights, IL, Waveland Press. Pp.
139-149. (with Guy Hagen).
2004 Network
Thinking in Peace and Conflict Studies. Peace
and Conflict Studies, 11(1):69-75..
2004
Connecting the Dots Without
Forgetting the Circles. Connections
26(2):107-119.
2006 Supranational Networks: States and Firms. Peace and Conflict Studies, 13(1)68-80.
2006 Network
Perspectives on Communities. Structure
and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related
Sciences: Vol. 1: No. 4, Article 2. http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/vol1/iss4/art2 (An expanded, version is available (2012) as a chapter in a book, Social
Networking and Community Behavior Modeling: Qualitative and Quantitative
Measures, edited by Maytham Safar, and published by IGI The original
version is available at the following web address: http://repositories.cdlib.org/imbs/socdyn/sdeas/vol1/iss4/art2
2007 Developing
an Electronic Ethnography. IN Michael Angrosino, ed. Doing Cultural
Anthropology
2011 Anthropologist Perspective on Social Network Analysis
and Mining. IN Social Network Analysis
and Mining, Volume 1, No. 1. Anthropologist
view of social network analysis and data mining by Alvin W.
Wolfe
With Dr. Honggang Yang,
a graduate of the USF doctoral program in applied anthropology,
Professor Wolfe edited the Proceedings of the Key Symposium which they
organized for the 1994 Southern Anthropological Society Annual Meeting, Anthropological
Contributions to Conflict Resolution, published by the University of Georgia
Press in 1996.