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George Marcus
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George Marcus is an American anthropologist, founder of the journal and editor of the series.
Since the 1980s, Marcus has helped transform the way social and cultural anthropologists think, research and write about their work.
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George Marcus is an American anthropologist, founder of the journal and editor of the series.
Since the 1980s, Marcus has helped transform the way social and cultural anthropologists think, research and write about their work. He served as the , where he chaired the anthropology department for 25 years. He is currently holds the position of Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Irvine, where he established a Center for Ethnography, devoted to experiments and innovations in this form of inquiry.
Marcus has contributed greatly to his field’s transformation, beginning in the mid-1980s with two important books, Writing Culture and Anthropology as Cultural Critique. These two highly cited texts point out that, when writing a description and analysis of a group of people or civilization, anthropologists typically frame their thoughts according to their own social, political and literary history. This revealed other issues, such as the inclination of anthropologists to study people with less power and status than themselves. Marcus has been a pioneer in studying “elites”–people with a great amount of social power. He has researched and written about nobility in Tonga, an upper-class group with family fortunes in Galveston, Texas, and a Portuguese nobleman.
Marcus led the movement in anthropology to pay greater attention to the modern world’s influence on communities once regarded as isolated. He advocated new research methods to reflect this contemporary focus, including how a community changes and disperses around the world. Thirty years ago, most anthropologists studied people who had lived in the same location for hundreds of years, with a narrow focus on local, long-standing traditions. Today, an anthropologist interested in the people of Samoa, for example, would likely not only study life in the Samoan Islands, but also Samoan communities in New Zealand, Hawaii and California.
Marcus also has influenced the field through his role as an editor. He was the founding editor of Cultural Anthropology, the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and a top journal in its field. In the 1990s, Marcus edited an innovative eight-volume series of annuals called Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century, which documented the diverse social and cultural transitions at the turn of the millennium. The series covered a wide range of topics through conversations and interviews between scholars and individuals involved in the crucial processes of change.
Marcus’ current focus involves looking at key institutions of great power, and their connections and consequences for ordinary people. With a colleague, he is applying an anthropological research approach to people’s thought and decision-making processes in the operation of central banks in the U.S. and Europe.
He lives with his wife, the historian Patricia Seed, with whom he has two children, Rachel and Avery.
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