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