George E. Marcus | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Yale University Harvard University [1] |
Occupation | Anthropologist |
Known for | Founding the Cultural Anthropology journal, postmodern anthropology, ethnographic studies |
Spouse | Patricia Seed |
Children | 2 |
Part of a series on |
Anthropology |
---|
George Emanuel Marcus is an American professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine who focuses on the anthropology of elites. [2]
Marcus received a B.A. from Yale University in 1968 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1976. [1] He spent the 1982–83 academic year at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he came up with the idea for Anthropology as Cultural Critique, which he co-wrote with Michael M. J. Fischer and published in 1986 (a second edition was later published in 1999). [3]
Afterwards, he served as the Joseph D. Jamail Professor at Rice University, where he chaired the anthropology department for 25 years. He 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.
He is married to the historian Patricia Seed, a historian who specializes in cartography and also teaches as a professor at UC Irvine. [4] They have two children.
Marcus has studied "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. In two books, Writing Culture and Anthropology as Cultural Critique, he argues that anthropologists typically frame their thoughts according to their own social, political, and literary history, and are inclined to study people with less power and status than themselves.
Marcus pushed 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. In the 1980s, most anthropologists studied people who had lived in the same location for hundreds of years, with a narrow focus on longstanding local 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's current research focuses on institutions of great power, and their connections and consequences for ordinary people. Working with anthropologist Douglas R. Holmes, he applies an anthropological research approach to people's thought- and decision-making processes in the operation of central banks in the United States and Europe.
He founded Cultural Anthropology , the Society for Cultural Anthropology's academic journal of repute, and was the editor of the University of Chicago Press's Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century, an eight-volume series of annuals published in the 1990s that documented "unsettling dilemmas and unprecedented challenges facing cultural studies on the brink of the twenty-first century". [5] The series covered a range of subjects, including the Internet, conspiracy theories, documentaries, nuclear weapons, environmental politics, artificial intelligence, and cryonics. [6]
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.
Cultural relativism is the idea that a person's beliefs and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that the norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated using the norms and values of another.
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Marshall David Sahlins was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Visual anthropology is a subfield of social anthropology that is concerned, in part, with the study and production of ethnographic photography, film and, since the mid-1990s, new media. More recently it has been used by historians of science and visual culture. Although sometimes wrongly conflated with ethnographic film, visual anthropology encompasses much more, including the anthropological study of all visual representations such as dance and other kinds of performance, museums and archiving, all visual arts, and the production and reception of mass media. Histories and analyses of representations from many cultures are part of visual anthropology: research topics include sandpaintings, tattoos, sculptures and reliefs, cave paintings, scrimshaw, jewelry, hieroglyphics, paintings and photographs. Also within the province of the subfield are studies of human vision, properties of media, the relationship of visual form and function, and applied, collaborative uses of visual representations.
History of anthropology in this article refers primarily to the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of modern anthropology. The term anthropology itself, innovated as a Neo-Latin scientific word during the Renaissance, has always meant "the study of man". The topics to be included and the terminology have varied historically. At present they are more elaborate than they were during the development of anthropology. For a presentation of modern social and cultural anthropology as they have developed in Britain, France, and North America since approximately 1900, see the relevant sections under Anthropology.
Salvage ethnography is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas; he and his students aimed to record vanishing Native American cultures. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have used the term as part of a critique of 19th-century ethnography and early modern anthropology.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
John Derek Freeman was a New Zealand anthropologist known for his criticism of Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society, as described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa. His attack "ignited controversy of a scale, visibility, and ferocity never before seen in anthropology."
Tom Boellstorff is an anthropologist based at the University of California, Irvine. In his career to date, his interests have included the anthropology of sexuality, the anthropology of globalization, digital anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, the anthropology of HIV/AIDS, and linguistic anthropology.
An ethnographic film is a non-fiction film, often similar to a documentary film, historically shot by Western filmmakers and dealing with non-Western people, and sometimes associated with anthropology. Definitions of the term are not definitive. Some academics claim it is more documentary, less anthropology, while others think it rests somewhere between the fields of anthropology and documentary films.
Daniel Martin Varisco, is an American anthropologist and historian.
James Clifford is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work combines perspectives from history, literature, history of science, and anthropology.
Ethnocinema, from Jean Rouch’s cine-ethnography and ethno-fictions, is an emerging practice of intercultural filmmaking being defined and extended by Melbourne, Australia-based writer and arts educator, Anne Harris, and others. Originally derived from the discipline of anthropology, ethnocinema is one form of ethnographic filmmaking that prioritises mutuality, collaboration and social change. The practice's ethos claims that the role of anthropologists, and other cultural, media and educational researchers, must adapt to changing communities, transnational identities and new notions of representation for the 21st century.
Melvin Lawrence Ember was an American cultural anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher with wide-ranging interests who combined an active research career with writing for nonprofessionals.
This bibliography of anthropology lists some notable publications in the field of anthropology, including its various subfields. It is not comprehensive and continues to be developed. It also includes a number of works that are not by anthropologists but are relevant to the field, such as literary theory, sociology, psychology, and philosophical anthropology.
Johannes Fabian is an emeritus professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His ethnographic and historical research focuses on religious movements, language, work, and popular culture in the Shaba mining region of Zaire. His theoretical and critical work addresses questions of epistemology and history in anthropology, notably the influential book Time and the Other (1983), which has become a classic in the field of anthropology.