Lives in trust

by George E. Marcus

The histories of great American dynastic fortunes, such as those of the Rockefellers, DuPonts, and Guggenheims, have been told repeatedly as family stories. They have been tales of the passions, jealousies, distinguished achievements, and eccentricities among generations of parents and children, brothers and sisters. The essays in this book, developed from the perspectives of contemporary anthropology and cultural studies, establish a different field of vision for understanding private concentrations of great wealth and their legacies in the late twentieth-century United States. Over time, a family becomes dynastic by growing into an organization with a massive store of wealth rather than kinship at its center. A dynasty then takes on a set of values and a mystique that depends on a diverse range of experts, institutions, mass media, and ordinary middle-class people to empower it. The mature dynasty is as much the sum of complex interests in the culture and production of wealth as it i