Ocasi

George E. Marcus is Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. From the 1980s, he has been concerned with the study of upper classes and elite institutions in the United States and other Western societies. His major publications include The Nobility and the Chiefly Tradition in the Modern Kingdom of Tonga (1980), Elites: Ethnographic Issues (1983), (with Michael Fischer) Anthropology As Cultural Critique (1986), (with James Clifford) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), and (with Peter Dobkin Hall) Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth Century America (1992). Fernando Mascarenhas is Marques of Fronteira and Alorna, and lives in Lisboa, Portugal.

Here is serendipity, with a result both provocative and entertaining. A Portuguese nobleman hosts a scholarly conference at his palace and finds an interesting American among the participants. So begins the story of Marcus and the Marquis, told here as an epistolary ethnography by e-mail, combined with remarkable and surprising autobiography (mostly from Lisbon, some from Houston), an inside account of a developing research project—and isn't there a dash of magical realism as well? In any case, the renewal of anthropology goes on.

• 1 Foreword by Fernando Mascarenhas 2 Introduction by George E. Marcus 3 Letter Exchanges 4 Epilogue by George E. Marcus 5 Appendix A. Sermon to my Successor by Fernando Mascarenhas 6 Appendix B. Preamble to the Chart of the Foundation 7 Appendix C. The Portuguese Nobility Today: A Preliminary Report by George E. Marcus and Diana L. L. Hill