George E. Marcus

George E. Marcus
Born	Brownsville, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University Harvard University
Occupation	Anthropologist
Known for	Founding the Cultural Anthropology journal, postmodern anthropology, ethnographic studies
Spouse(s)	Patricia Seed
Children	Rachel, Avery

George E. Marcus is an American professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine who focuses on the anthropology of elites.

Marcus received a B.A. from Yale University in 1968 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1976. 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).

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. 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.

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