George E. Marcus and Fernando Mascarenhas: Ocasião: The Marquis and the Anthropologist, A Collaboration.

How have the roles of cultural elites such as the Portuguese nobility changed during the course of the twentieth century? How does the contemporary Portuguese nobility view itself and how might it wish to present itself within Portuguese society today? George E. Marcus and Fernando Mascarenhas’s book Ocasião: The Marquis and the Anthropologist, A Collaboration, begins to explore these and other complex questions concerning contemporary nobility in Portugal. Ocasião traces a remarkable correspondence between George E. Marcus, a distinguished American anthropologist and professor and Fernando Mascarenhas, Marquis of Fronteira and Alorna and president of the Fundação das Casas de Fronteira e Alorna. The book is part of an ethnographic study of contemporary Portuguese nobility that emerged from a seminar organized by the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS), University of Lisbon, and held at the Palácio Fronteira in October of 1997. The close to two hundred letters and email messages cover a period between March 1998 and July 1999. These are supplemented with writings that reveal some of the results of fieldwork, such as interviews and meetings conducted in Portugal in the summer of 1999. There are some subsequent communications as well as English translations of Mascarenhas’s Sermon to My Successor, and the Fundação das Casas de Fronteira e Alorna’s Charter Preamble.