George E. Marcus Appointed Chancellor's Professor in School of Social Sciences

George E. Marcus, an influential anthropologist known for advancing contemporary anthropological theory and methods, has joined the UC Irvine faculty as a Chancellor's Professor in the School of Social Sciences.

For the past 20 years, Marcus has helped transform the way social and cultural anthropologists think, research and write about their work. He has served as the Joseph D. Jamail Professor at Rice University, where he has chaired the anthropology department for 25 years. He comes to UCI after a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

"George Marcus is a leading scholar and a remarkably innovative intellectual who has led a revolution within anthropology," said Michael Burton, professor and chair of anthropology. "We are thrilled to have him join our faculty, and believe his scholarship and research will benefit students and colleagues throughout social sciences and humanities."

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.

At UCI, Marcus will teach graduate seminars on anthropology theory and ethnographic research methods, as well as undergraduate courses on elites, knowledge systems and ethnography.

"I cannot think of another department in the country where I would rather be. UCI's quality of faculty, growth in its graduate program and innovative research have been widely noted in anthropology and related fields," Marcus said. "With my new colleagues, I'm hoping to continue contributing to the reinvention of my field's research approach, so that it will make the valuable interventions it always has, but in radically changing intellectual and social environments."

Marcus received his doctorate in anthropology from Harvard. He has published five books, 14 edited volumes, 112 articles and chapters, and over 50 books and film reviews. Marcus' appointment became effective July 1.

The Chancellor's Professor designation is reserved for faculty who have achieved acclaim for their accomplishments and who are likely to continue producing notable achievements in scholarship. There are currently 13 Chancellor's Professors at UCI, including Marcus.

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