This book is a collection of essays focusing on the role that elites play in shaping modern societies. Critiquing the treatment accorded elites as subjects in recent Western social thought, the essays reflect upon past results and explore directions in the investigation of elite groups by anthropologists.

What makes an elite? This authoritative new volume examines elite groups in power across Europe, North America, Mexico, Peru, Indonesia and Africa to answer this question fully at a time of their increasing dominance.

Offering insightful anthropological-historical contributions to the understanding of elites worldwide, this book helps us grasp their ways of life and role in times of contested global inequalities. Case studies include the Polish gentry, the white former colonial elite of Mauritius, professional elites, and transnational (financial) elites.

Between 1815 and 1861, American slaveholders and southern Italian landowners presided over the economic and social life of two predominantly agricultural regions, the U.S. South and Italy's Mezzogiorno. Enrico Dal Lago ingeniously compares these agrarian elites, demonstrating how the study of each enhances our understanding of the other as well as of their shared nineteenth-century world. Agrarian Elites charts the parallel developments of plantations and latifondi in relation to changes in the world economy. At the same time, it examines the spread of "paternalistic" models of family relations and of slave and free-labor management that accompanied the rise of large groups of American slaveholders and southern Italian landed proprietors in the early-to-mid-1800s. According to Dal Lago, the most articulate and enlightened members of both elites combined the pursuit of profit with the implementation of "modern" contractual practices in dealing with their workforces. Both elites also used their economic and social power for political advantage, opposing the intervention of their national governments in local affairs. The search for ever-better protection of their respective interests in slaveholding and landed property led ultimately to their support for the creation of two nations, the Confederate States of America and the Kingdom of Italy, both in 1861.Dal Lago brings together two subjects that have generated considerable debate and research: systems of slave and nominally free labor and the elites who employed them, and nineteenth-century nationalism. With its pathbreaking approach and singular and comparative insights, Agrarian Elites will inform not only American and Italian studies but also the very practice of comparative history.

In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship. Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.

In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship. Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, Ethnography through Thick and Thin will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.