He currently holds the position of Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Irvine, where he established a Center for Ethnography, devoted to experiments and innovations in this form of inquiry.

Marcus pushed anthropology to pay greater attention to the modern world's influence on communities once regarded as isolated.

In the 1980s, most anthropologists studied people who had lived in the same location for hundreds of years, with a narrow focus on longstanding local traditions.

Working with anthropologist Douglas R. Holmes, he applies an anthropological research approach to people's thought- and decision-making processes in the operation of central banks in the United States and Europe.

[5] The series covered a range of subjects, including the Internet, conspiracy theories, documentaries, nuclear weapons, environmental politics, artificial intelligence, and cryonics.