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Reviews / Votes

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. -- Ulf Hannerz, Stockholm University George Marcus is truly one of the most interesting anthropologists writing today. His two enduring commitments-to the reform of anthropological practice, and to understanding the inner lives of cultural elites-play off against one another in myriad ways in this fascinating book. Marcus's idea to publish the extensive exchange of e-mails between himself and the Portuguese nobleman Fernando Mascarenhas was a brave move, not least because it gives us a chance to see the 'native' talking back, most articulately, to the anthropologist. -- Sherry B. Ortner, University of California, Los Angeles This is a work of both virtuosity and virtuality, realized through a modernist 'uncanny': all anthropologists should here find, astonishingly reflected, the gestation of their own affective and intellectual intimacies in fieldwork. Although the protagonists first met at a conference (at which I was also present), their deeper intellectual and affective intimacy emerged, improbably, in e-mail, safe, perhaps, from a sardonic physical presence that might otherwise have impeded their remarkable cumulative insight. -- Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University; author of Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State