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September 30, 2005 > News > Marcus to leave ANTH department

Marcus to leave ANTH department

By Alex Stoll | For the Thresher

Former Anthropology department chair George Marcus has decided to leave Rice to become a Chancellor’s professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of California-Irvine.

Marcus spent last year on sabbatical leave from Rice as a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Anthropology professor Julie Taylor said Marcus’ departure will be an important change for Rice’s anthropology department, which has thrived since he became chair of the department in the late 1970s. Taylor said Marcus shifted the field’s focus toward large-scale societies during his 25-year tenure as chair.

Anthropology professor James Faubion, the current chair of the anthropology department, said Marcus attracted attention as a celebrity anthropologist.

“He’s one of the best known living anthropologists today and is probably the best known American anthropologist in Europe,” Faubion said.

However, Taylor said Marcus remained accessible.

“It’s something very special that he was so generous with his time,” Taylor said. “He was eminent worldwide, and so he might have thought he’d just shut his door and stay in there and be eminent, but he didn’t.”

Faubion said he does not think the department’s focus will change significantly with Marcus’ departure.

“It’s not a rupture,” he said. “It’s something of a change, because I think, inescapably, the department was dominated by Dr. Marcus’ interests.”

Marcus said he will have an ongoing relationship with the department for several years, especially with the graduate program.

Faubion said Marcus was integral in establishing the department.

“The end product was in fact a remarkably coherent department, and it has remained so,” Faubion said. “For its size, it is far more prominent than one would have predicted. Among the well-known programs, it is by far the smallest.”

In 1986 Marcus co-authored Anthropology as Cultural Critique, which became a standard textbook of vanguard anthropology and brought worldwide recognition to Rice’s anthropology department.

In the short term, Faubion said he expects the department will have to work harder to attract graduate students to the anthropology department.

“It just simply means that we will have to make more of an effort than we have had to make in the past to advertise the department and more aggressively recruit in undergraduate departments that we think will send us congenial students,” he said.

Anthropology major Amanda Anglin said Marcus lent legitimacy to the department.

“He brought a lot of research grants and a lot of extra attention to our department which gave us more clout,” Anglin, a Lovett College senior, said. “We have one of the leading departments in anthropology because he is so very well known on a worldwide scale.”

Anglin said she thinks the undergraduate program will be mostly unaffected.

“Although it’s sad to see him go because he is so influential in the community, I think that Dr. Faubion is still going to keep us on the same track that we’re currently on,”Anglin said. “Dr. Faubion is also really well respected in our field, so I don’t think it’ll affect us as much as graduate students.”

Marcus also said that he might not be done at Rice.

“While I have moved to Irvine to stay, there is an outside chance I might return,” he said.

Since Marcus has not officially resigned, Faubion said he cannot begin a search to replace him. Faubion said he expects Marcus will officially resign by the middle of the spring semester.

Marcus always taught a fall seminar for incoming graduate students, and his spring course was usually aimed at undergraduates, Faubion said.

“He first taught a course called The History and Ethnography of ‘blank’, and the blank was filled in with a particular people who had been the object of sustained ethnographic study,” Faubion said.

More recently, Marcus taught a course entitled Anthropology in the Contemporary World, directed at seniors.

Faubion says that he plans to transform Anthropology in the Contemporary World into a capstone course requiring a major paper. He said the department will probably make the course a requirement for senior anthropology majors.

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