George Marcus wrote a book you probably haven’t heard of, but should.  It is called Lives in Trust and it was published in 1992 and is $146 on Amazon right now.  

Professor Marcus is an anthropologist who studied tribes in Tonga and then applied what he learned to study dynastic wealth in families starting in Texas.  The book has great essays on the HL Hunt family, who tried to corner the silver market in 1980, the Bingham family, who fought over a newspaper chain in Kentucky, a study of two very different family fortunes in Galveston Texas, and an analysis of one of my favorite books, Old Money by Nelson Aldrich.   He discusses the importance of your image of your ancestors and the creation of family ideology, the emptiness at the center of the Getty fortune, and a great essay by his collaborator the late respected philanthropic scholar Peter Dobkin Hall on the efforts of the Rockefeller family to control the narratives told about the family over decades.

In our discussion today, we talk about his career, the book, his interesting concept that he calls the “dynastic uncanny” and his fascinating dive into the meaning of nobility in the current-day Portuguese aristocracy.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with George Marcus.

Biography:

George Marcus is one of the world’s leading anthropologists.  He is the Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irving, and previously chaired the anthropology department at Rice University for twenty-five years.  He is the author of dozens of books and articles including Ethnography Through Thick and Thin and Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth-Century America.  Professor Marcus received a B.A. from Yale in 1968 and a Ph.D from Harvard in 1976.

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Joe Reilly is a family office consultant, and the host of the Private Capital Podcast as well as the Inheritance Podcast. 

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