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Robin Fox (July 15, 1934 – January 18, 2024) was a British-American anthropologist who wrote on the topics of incest avoidance, marriage systems, human and primate kinship systems, evolutionary anthropology, sociology and the history of ideas in the social sciences. He founded the department of anthropology at Rutgers University in 1967 and remained a professor there for the rest of his career, also being a director of research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation from 1972 to 1984.
Fox published The Imperial Animal, with Lionel Tiger in 1971 one of the earliest to advocate and demonstrate an evolutionary approach to the understanding of human social behaviour. His daughter Kate Fox wrote the book Watching the English.
In 2013 Fox was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology).
Life and work
Robin Fox was born in the village of Haworth [citation needed] in the Yorkshire Dales, at the nadir of the Great Depression in 1934. He had very little schooling during the Second World War, moving all over England with his soldier father (ex-Indian Army), and his mother, then an army nursing aide. After a narrow escape from death by bombing, he pursued his early education through the Army, the Church of England, public libraries, and the BBC, more than through formal schooling. Then through a series of scholarships—one of them to the grammar school in Thornton, West Yorkshire, he made his way to the London School of Economics in 1953 and gained a first degree in Sociology with First Class Honours. This included Philosophy and Social Anthropology, with much influence from Karl Popper, Ernest Gellner, and Raymond Firth—and occasional interaction with Bertrand Russell.
He went to Harvard for graduate work in the Department of Social Relations where he found himself under the tutelage of Clyde Kluckhohn, Evon Vogt, Paul Friedrich and Dell Hymes, in New Mexico, where he studied language and society among the Pueblo Indians. He concentrated on the Pueblo of Cochiti, on the Rio Grande, on which he wrote his PhD thesis (submitted to the University of London and examined by Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach and Daryll Ford). A revised version of the thesis with his analysis of the evolution of Pueblo kinship systems and the "Crow-Omaha" question, was published as The Keresan Bridge: A Problem in Pueblo Ethnology, 1967. This logico-conjectural attempt to reconstruct the history of kinship terms was completely against the grain of Functionalist orthodoxy in England at the time, and equally critical of the prevailing American theories of acculturation.
He returned to England, where he taught for four years in the department of sociology at the University of Exeter, starting fieldwork on Tory Island, a remote Gaelic-speaking community off the coast of County Donegal in Ireland (his mother's family, also called Fox, came from Ireland.) He wrote his first museum-series publication Kinship and Land Tenure on Tory Island (1966.) His work on the island eventually resulted in a book The Tory Islanders: A People of the Celtic Fringe (1978), for which the University of Ulster awarded him a doctor of science (D.Sc.) degree. He then returned to the LSE for four more years, lecturing mainly on kinship, and producing, Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective, in 1967.
Fox had published "Sibling incest" in the British Journal of Sociology (1962), in which he revived the neglected theories of Edward Westermarck, coining the term "Westermarck Effect". Under the influence of such figures as John Bowlby, David Attenborough (who was his student for a while), Robert Ardrey, Niko Tinbergen, Desmond Morris, Michael Chance and Lionel Tiger, he became interested in ethology. He gave the first primate behaviour and human evolution lectures in the department, co-teaching with the primatological anatomist John Napier from the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. He and Tiger wrote a paper on "The Zoological Perspective in Social Science" (1966). He added to it with his Malinowski Memorial Lecture of 1967 on "Aspects of Hominid Behavioral Evolution."
Rutgers University offered him a chair of anthropology in 1967, and the chance to start a new department, including Tiger. In 2009 its two-degree programs, evolutionary anthropology and cultural anthropology, were ranked in the top ten in the country. He and Tiger completed their joint work, The Imperial Animal, in 1970, a book that contributed to nature/nurture debate of the next few decades. He spent an academic year at Stanford University School of Medicine (Department of Psychiatry) as an NIMH fellow, studying behavioural biology and the brain with David Hamburg and Karl Pribram.
In 1972, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, through its president Mason Gross, ex-president of Rutgers, made Tiger and Fox joint Research Directors and started a program of support for work particularly on violence and dominance. The list of their grantees is a Who's Who in the early development of bio-social science and of what came to be known as sociobiology. They worked for twelve years with the Foundation, and during that time he did original research with Dieter Steklis among macaque monkeys on an island off Bermuda and vervet monkeys on St. Kitts. He produced several books including Encounter with Anthropology (1973) Biosocial Anthropology (editor and contributor, 1975), The Red Lamp of Incest (1980) and Neonate Cognition (1984, edited with Jacques Mehler of CNRS, Paris).
During this same period he was a visiting professor at Oxford, Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), the University of California, San Diego, and the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, where he did a "participant observer" stint as a bullfighter, studying the provincial bullfight culture of southern Colombia. In 1985 Rutgers made him a University Professor, the highest honour it can give a faculty member. He wrote The Search for Society (1989) his "equal time response" to the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz, and The Violent Imagination (1989), a book of essays, verse, satire, drama, and dialogue.
Fox was then a Senior Overseas Scholar at St John's College, Cambridge, and wrote a series of related collections of his essays. The first was Reproduction and Succession (1993), relating his part in both the appeal of a Mormon policeman to the Supreme Court and the famous "Baby M" surrogate mother trials in New Jersey. Then followed The Challenge of Anthropology (1994), and Conjectures and Confrontations (1997). In 2000 he added significantly to the material in The Violent Imagination, plus a foreword by Ashley Montagu, which came out as The Passionate Mind. He published a number of controversial papers on contemporary affairs in The National Interest – nationalism, the nature of war, the Northern Ireland problem, democracy in Iraq, the "end of history" – and a series of brisk exchanges on human rights, mostly with Francis Fukuyama and Amnesty International. He wrote an autobiography of the first forty years of his life as Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life (2004.)
Fox then wrote further books on the tribal basis of behavior, civilization and the savage mind, and the Shakespeare authorship question (Shakespeare's Education: Schools, Lawsuits and Theater in the Tudor Miracle (2012). In 2013 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences (Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology). In 2014 a festschrift for him was published by Transaction Publishers and edited by Michael Egan titled The Character of Human Institutions: Robin Fox and the Rise of Biosocial Science with seventeen contributions.
He was married to Lin Fox (Ed.D. Columbia) who taught Health Sciences at Kean University, New Jersey; they lived on a small farm outside Princeton, New Jersey. He continued to teach (American Indians, Origin and Fall of Civilizations, Comparative and Persistent Mythology, Incest in Literature) and to pursue research on the archaeology of the Calusa Indians of SW Florida, and the evolutionary relationship between consanguineous marriage and fertility.
Fox died on January 18, 2024, at the age of 89.
Books
- The Keresan Bridge: A Problem in Pueblo Ethnology. London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology. Berg Publishers. 1967. p. 208. ISBN 9781845200015.
- (with Lionel Tiger) The Imperial Animal. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1971. p. 308. ISBN 978-0-03-086582-4.
- The Tory Islanders: A People of the Celtic Fringe. Cambridge University Press. 1978. pp. 210. ISBN 9780521292986.
- Kinship and marriage: an anthropological perspective. Cambridge studies in social anthropology. Vol. 50. Cambridge University Press. 1983. p. 273. ISBN 978-0-521-27823-2.
- The Red Lamp of Incest: An Enquiry Into the Origins of Mind and Society. University of Notre Dame Press. 1983. p. 284. ISBN 978-0-268-01620-3.
- The search for society: quest for a biosocial science and morality. Rutgers University Press. 1989. p. 264. ISBN 978-0-8135-1488-8.
- Encounter with anthropology (2nd ed.). Transaction Publishers. 1991. p. 338. ISBN 978-0-88738-870-5.
- Reproduction and Succession: Studies in Anthropology, Law, and Society. Transaction Publishers. 1993. pp. 269. ISBN 978-1-56000-924-5.
- The Challenge of Anthropology: Old Encounters and New Excursions. Transaction Publishers. 1994. pp. 431. ISBN 978-1-56000-827-9.
- Conjectures & confrontations: science, evolution, social concern. Transaction Publishers. 1997. pp. 212. ISBN 978-1-56000-286-4.
- The passionate mind: sources of destruction & creativity (2nd ed.). Transaction Publishers. 2000. p. 331. ISBN 978-0-7658-0632-1.
- Participant observer: memoir of a transatlantic life. Transaction Publishers. 2004. p. 575. ISBN 978-0-7658-0238-5.
- The tribal imagination: Civilization and the savage mind. Harvard University Press. 2011. pp. 417. ISBN 978-0-674-05901-6.
- Shakespeare's Education: Schools, Lawsuits and Theater in the Tudor Miracle. Laugwitz Verlag. 2012. p. 183. ISBN 9783-933077-30-1.
References
- "Robin Fox". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 18 March 2022.
- See the dedication to Kinship and Marriage.
- Fox, Robin (1983). Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-27823-2.
- "Remembering Dr. Robin Fox". Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. 19 March 2024. Retrieved 24 September 2024.
External links
- Website
- "Robin Fox". Social Issues Research Centre. Retrieved 16 July 2010.
- Biography at the Wayback Machine (archived 17 December 2007)
This article has multiple issues Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page Learn how and when to remove these messages This article is an autobiography or has been extensively edited by the subject or by someone connected to the subject It may need editing to conform to Wikipedia s neutral point of view policy There may be relevant discussion on the talk page July 2014 Learn how and when to remove this message A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia s content policies particularly neutral point of view Please discuss further on the talk page July 2014 Learn how and when to remove this message This biography of a living person includes a list of general references but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately especially if potentially libelous or harmful Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations July 2014 Learn how and when to remove this message Learn how and when to remove this message Robin Fox July 15 1934 January 18 2024 was a British American anthropologist who wrote on the topics of incest avoidance marriage systems human and primate kinship systems evolutionary anthropology sociology and the history of ideas in the social sciences He founded the department of anthropology at Rutgers University in 1967 and remained a professor there for the rest of his career also being a director of research for the H F Guggenheim Foundation from 1972 to 1984 Robin Fox Fox published The Imperial Animal with Lionel Tiger in 1971 one of the earliest to advocate and demonstrate an evolutionary approach to the understanding of human social behaviour His daughter Kate Fox wrote the book Watching the English In 2013 Fox was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology Life and workRobin Fox was born in the village of Haworth citation needed in the Yorkshire Dales at the nadir of the Great Depression in 1934 He had very little schooling during the Second World War moving all over England with his soldier father ex Indian Army and his mother then an army nursing aide After a narrow escape from death by bombing he pursued his early education through the Army the Church of England public libraries and the BBC more than through formal schooling Then through a series of scholarships one of them to the grammar school in Thornton West Yorkshire he made his way to the London School of Economics in 1953 and gained a first degree in Sociology with First Class Honours This included Philosophy and Social Anthropology with much influence from Karl Popper Ernest Gellner and Raymond Firth and occasional interaction with Bertrand Russell He went to Harvard for graduate work in the Department of Social Relations where he found himself under the tutelage of Clyde Kluckhohn Evon Vogt Paul Friedrich and Dell Hymes in New Mexico where he studied language and society among the Pueblo Indians He concentrated on the Pueblo of Cochiti on the Rio Grande on which he wrote his PhD thesis submitted to the University of London and examined by Raymond Firth Edmund Leach and Daryll Ford A revised version of the thesis with his analysis of the evolution of Pueblo kinship systems and the Crow Omaha question was published as The Keresan Bridge A Problem in Pueblo Ethnology 1967 This logico conjectural attempt to reconstruct the history of kinship terms was completely against the grain of Functionalist orthodoxy in England at the time and equally critical of the prevailing American theories of acculturation He returned to England where he taught for four years in the department of sociology at the University of Exeter starting fieldwork on Tory Island a remote Gaelic speaking community off the coast of County Donegal in Ireland his mother s family also called Fox came from Ireland He wrote his first museum series publication Kinship and Land Tenure on Tory Island 1966 His work on the island eventually resulted in a book The Tory Islanders A People of the Celtic Fringe 1978 for which the University of Ulster awarded him a doctor of science D Sc degree He then returned to the LSE for four more years lecturing mainly on kinship and producing Kinship and Marriage An Anthropological Perspective in 1967 Fox had published Sibling incest in the British Journal of Sociology 1962 in which he revived the neglected theories of Edward Westermarck coining the term Westermarck Effect Under the influence of such figures as John Bowlby David Attenborough who was his student for a while Robert Ardrey Niko Tinbergen Desmond Morris Michael Chance and Lionel Tiger he became interested in ethology He gave the first primate behaviour and human evolution lectures in the department co teaching with the primatological anatomist John Napier from the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine He and Tiger wrote a paper on The Zoological Perspective in Social Science 1966 He added to it with his Malinowski Memorial Lecture of 1967 on Aspects of Hominid Behavioral Evolution Rutgers University offered him a chair of anthropology in 1967 and the chance to start a new department including Tiger In 2009 its two degree programs evolutionary anthropology and cultural anthropology were ranked in the top ten in the country He and Tiger completed their joint work The Imperial Animal in 1970 a book that contributed to nature nurture debate of the next few decades He spent an academic year at Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry as an NIMH fellow studying behavioural biology and the brain with David Hamburg and Karl Pribram In 1972 the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation through its president Mason Gross ex president of Rutgers made Tiger and Fox joint Research Directors and started a program of support for work particularly on violence and dominance The list of their grantees is a Who s Who in the early development of bio social science and of what came to be known as sociobiology They worked for twelve years with the Foundation and during that time he did original research with Dieter Steklis among macaque monkeys on an island off Bermuda and vervet monkeys on St Kitts He produced several books including Encounter with Anthropology 1973 Biosocial Anthropology editor and contributor 1975 The Red Lamp of Incest 1980 and Neonate Cognition 1984 edited with Jacques Mehler of CNRS Paris During this same period he was a visiting professor at Oxford Paris Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales the University of California San Diego and the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota Colombia where he did a participant observer stint as a bullfighter studying the provincial bullfight culture of southern Colombia In 1985 Rutgers made him a University Professor the highest honour it can give a faculty member He wrote The Search for Society 1989 his equal time response to the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz and The Violent Imagination 1989 a book of essays verse satire drama and dialogue Fox was then a Senior Overseas Scholar at St John s College Cambridge and wrote a series of related collections of his essays The first was Reproduction and Succession 1993 relating his part in both the appeal of a Mormon policeman to the Supreme Court and the famous Baby M surrogate mother trials in New Jersey Then followed The Challenge of Anthropology 1994 and Conjectures and Confrontations 1997 In 2000 he added significantly to the material in The Violent Imagination plus a foreword by Ashley Montagu which came out as The Passionate Mind He published a number of controversial papers on contemporary affairs in The National Interest nationalism the nature of war the Northern Ireland problem democracy in Iraq the end of history and a series of brisk exchanges on human rights mostly with Francis Fukuyama and Amnesty International He wrote an autobiography of the first forty years of his life as Participant Observer Memoir of a Transatlantic Life 2004 Fox then wrote further books on the tribal basis of behavior civilization and the savage mind and the Shakespeare authorship question Shakespeare s Education Schools Lawsuits and Theater in the Tudor Miracle 2012 In 2013 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology In 2014 a festschrift for him was published by Transaction Publishers and edited by Michael Egan titled The Character of Human Institutions Robin Fox and the Rise of Biosocial Science with seventeen contributions He was married to Lin Fox Ed D Columbia who taught Health Sciences at Kean University New Jersey they lived on a small farm outside Princeton New Jersey He continued to teach American Indians Origin and Fall of Civilizations Comparative and Persistent Mythology Incest in Literature and to pursue research on the archaeology of the Calusa Indians of SW Florida and the evolutionary relationship between consanguineous marriage and fertility Fox died on January 18 2024 at the age of 89 BooksThe Keresan Bridge A Problem in Pueblo Ethnology London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology Berg Publishers 1967 p 208 ISBN 9781845200015 with Lionel Tiger The Imperial Animal Holt Rinehart and Winston 1971 p 308 ISBN 978 0 03 086582 4 The Tory Islanders A People of the Celtic Fringe Cambridge University Press 1978 pp 210 ISBN 9780521292986 Kinship and marriage an anthropological perspective Cambridge studies in social anthropology Vol 50 Cambridge University Press 1983 p 273 ISBN 978 0 521 27823 2 The Red Lamp of Incest An Enquiry Into the Origins of Mind and Society University of Notre Dame Press 1983 p 284 ISBN 978 0 268 01620 3 The search for society quest for a biosocial science and morality Rutgers University Press 1989 p 264 ISBN 978 0 8135 1488 8 Encounter with anthropology 2nd ed Transaction Publishers 1991 p 338 ISBN 978 0 88738 870 5 Reproduction and Succession Studies in Anthropology Law and Society Transaction Publishers 1993 pp 269 ISBN 978 1 56000 924 5 The Challenge of Anthropology Old Encounters and New Excursions Transaction Publishers 1994 pp 431 ISBN 978 1 56000 827 9 Conjectures amp confrontations science evolution social concern Transaction Publishers 1997 pp 212 ISBN 978 1 56000 286 4 The passionate mind sources of destruction amp creativity 2nd ed Transaction Publishers 2000 p 331 ISBN 978 0 7658 0632 1 Participant observer memoir of a transatlantic life Transaction Publishers 2004 p 575 ISBN 978 0 7658 0238 5 The tribal imagination Civilization and the savage mind Harvard University Press 2011 pp 417 ISBN 978 0 674 05901 6 Shakespeare s Education Schools Lawsuits and Theater in the Tudor Miracle Laugwitz Verlag 2012 p 183 ISBN 9783 933077 30 1 References Robin Fox www nasonline org Retrieved 18 March 2022 See the dedication to Kinship and Marriage Fox Robin 1983 Kinship and Marriage An Anthropological Perspective Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 27823 2 Remembering Dr Robin Fox Rutgers The State University of New Jersey 19 March 2024 Retrieved 24 September 2024 External linksWebsite Robin Fox Social Issues Research Centre Retrieved 16 July 2010 Biography at the Wayback Machine archived 17 December 2007
