People Pages template

Chancellor's Professor
Department of Anthropology
gmarcus@uci.edu

Professor Marcus is interested in reflexive functions in social life in various contexts and how these modulate relationships among scientists, experts, people of all kinds, in everyday life, and in shaping anthropological fieldwork itself. The latter is increasingly based on relationships of shared intellectual epistemic capacities -- where it will not do to constitute subjects of research in the traditional ways. In ethnography, Marcus is interested in inculcating explicit norms of collaboration into fieldwork, characteristic of our age, and developing the forms of writing appropriate to their practice. A second line of inquiry concerns the power -- creative, subversive, reactionary, nostalgic and otherwise --of declining ways of life, fashions, and ideas. He is interested in the fate and traces of intellectual formations that were once reigning paradigms, the power of ideas that have peaked or already transformed, and how temporalities as cultural formations, moods, sensibilities define changing times. Marcus' conventional studies of traditional elites in various places have taught him to look for the effects and novelty of decaying, declining things on perceptions of what is hopeful and emergent. These studies have shown the way that things decline is culturally and historically as distinctive and of equal import to the way they rise and reign.

Selected Publications
The Late Editions series of annuals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993-2000.
Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas. George Macus, ed. Santa Fe: SAR Press, 1999.
Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Lives in Trust: The Fourtunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth Century America. With Peter D. Hall. Boulder: Westview Press: 1992.
Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Movement in the Human Sciences. With M. Fisher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography. With J. Clifford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Elites: Ethnographic Issues. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983.

Selected Articles
"Ethnography in/of the World System: the Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography." Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995) 95-117.
"Parody and the Parodic in Polynesian Cultural History." Cultural Anthropology 3.1 (1988) 68-76.