Biography
"We are a species among all the others, rather a special one, but one that will be judged like the others. We have no dispensation from nature; we are not cut loose from the requirements of natural selection; intelligence is not peculiar to us, nor does it guarantee our superiority or our success; we must measure up or join her list of interesting but extinct experiments in living and reproducing. Our only uniqueness is that if we go, it will be in full consciousness of what we do, which is no compliment to our uniqueness."
The Red Lamp of Incest: An Enquiry into the Origins of Mind and Society.
“We are chimps with existential questions.”
The Passionate Mind.
The following is a publisher's summary, so please bear with the impersonal style.
Robin Fox was born in the Brontë village of Haworth in the Yorkshire Dales, at the height of the Great Depression in 1934. He had very little schooling during WWII, moving all over England with his soldier father, and his mother, then an army nurse. (See the dedication to Kinship and Marriage.) The Church of England, public libraries, and the BBC, substituted for school. Through a series of scholarships (including one to the Grammar School in the village where the Brontës were born) he made his way to the London School of Economics in 1953, and did his undergraduate degree in Sociology (1st class honors) including a heavy dose of Philosophy and Social Anthropology. He went to Harvard for graduate work in the Department of Social Relations, and found himself in New Mexico studying language and society among the Pueblo Indians. He concentrated on the Pueblo of Cochiti, on the Rio Grande, on which he wrote his Ph.D. thesis, a revised version of which was published as The Keresan Bridge: A Problem in Pueblo Ethnology, 1967.
He returned to England where he taught for four years at the University of Exeter, starting fieldwork on Tory Island – a remote Gaelic-speaking community off the coast of Donegal in Ireland, and writing his first museum-series publication Kinship and Land Tenure on Tory Island. 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 the widely used text Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective (1967.) After publishing what became a classic paper "Sibling Incest" in the British Journal of Sociology (1962), and under the influence of such figures as John Bowlby, David Attenborough, Robert Ardrey, Niko Tinbergen, Desmond Morris and Lionel Tiger, he became interested in Ethology – the science of the evolution of behavior. He and Tiger wrote a paper on "The Zoological Perspective in Social Science" (1965.) This was one of the first salvos in the great debate on the nature/nurture issue that was to flare up in the sixties and seventies. During this time he saw three daughters into the world, Kate, Ellie and Anne. (See the dedication to Encounter with Anthropology.)
Rutgers University offered him a chair of anthropology in 1967, and the chance to start a new department, including Tiger. This has grown to be a major research department and graduate program. In 2010 its two degree programs (evolutionary anthropology and cultural anthropology) were ranked in the top ten in the country by Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. He and Tiger completed their joint work, The Imperial Animal, in 1970, a book that galvanized the nature/nurture debate and provoked a mix of enthusiasm and vituperation. He spent a year at Stanford University (Department of Psychiatry) as an NIMH fellow, studying behavioral 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 them 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 what came to be known as Sociobiology: E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, Napoleon Chagnon. It also included such people as Daniel Kahneman, who received the Nobel Prize for economics in 2003. They worked for twelve years with the Foundation, and during that time he did original research among Macaque monkeys on Bermuda, with Dieter Steklis, and produced several books including Encounter with Anthropology, Biosocial Anthropology (editor), The Red Lamp of Incest, and Neonate Cognition (edited with Jacques Mehler of CNRS.)
During this same period he was a visiting professor at Oxford, Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), California at San Diego, and the Universitad de los Andes in Bogatá, Colombia, where he did a participant observer stint as a bullfighter. In 1985 Rutgers made him a University Professor, the highest honor it can give a faculty member. He wrote The Search for Society, his "equal time response" to the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz, and The Violent Imagination, a book of essays, verse, satire, drama and dialogue. He was then a Senior Visiting Overseas Scholar at St. John's College, Cambridge, and wrote a series of related collections of his essays. The first was Reproduction and Succession, 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, and Conjectures and Confrontations. In 2001 he added significantly to the material in The Violent Imagination, plus a foreword by his neighbor and friend Ashley Montagu, which came out as The Passionate Mind. He has published a number of papers on contemporary affairs in The National Interest – nationalism, the nature of war, the Northern Ireland problem, and a series of exchanges on human rights.
(Now I am in my own voice again.) The dry bones of biography do not convey the richness and excitement of a life lived between the two worlds of Europe and America, and amongst some of the most energizing ideas of the century. To try to capture some of this I have completed a memoir of the first forty years of my "accidental life," called Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life (see Memoir.) Meanwhile I live near Princeton, New Jersey with my wife Lin, an ex-teacher of health sciences at Kean University. (See the dedication to The Passionate Mind.) We have a winter retreat on Sanibel Island in S. W. Florida, where I pursue a research interest in the archaeology of the Calusa Indians with the help of local boatmen and sailors. When not working I try my hand at art (pastel and watercolor), music (choral singing, classical guitar, songwriting,) and follow college football, especially the Scarlet Knights: an acquired passion replacing ancestral Rugby.
Lin, a longstanding member of the U. S. Green Building Council, works on her project to educate us on The Healthy House. Two of my daughters, after education in England, France, the USA and Ireland, live and work in England. Kate is a director of the Social Issues Research Center in Oxford, and has written a best seller: Watching the English. (Kate is married to Henry Marsh CBE, who was the subject of the award-winning film The English Surgeon.) Anne, having studied in the old USSR (Leningrad) founded and runs Galahad SMS Ltd., a social-science research firm, and has completed a doctoral dissertation for London University on the drinking culture of the British army, and produced my latest grandson. Ellie lived for nine years in the Bekaa Mountains of Lebanon with her husband and my other four grandsons. She and they speak fluent Arabic. They were rescued off the beaches in the great escape of 2006 and now live in New Jersey. (See the dedication to Reproduction and Succession.)
I am currently working on the relevance of evolutionary biology to the study of epic literature and rhyming verse, on animal dispersion and human sectarianism, and the origins and failures of civilization. I teach courses on the latter and on the history of anthropology, comparative mythology, incest in literature, and American Indians (see Courses.) My latest book is The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Harvard 2011.) (See Latest Book.) I am also working on my other interest in the Shakespeare authorship question, especially the issue of his possible education and the role of the Grammar Schools in the making of the Tudor miracle and the modern world, and translating his and my favorite, Ovid, on the side. In response to the events of 9/11, I became an American citizen in 2002: better late than never. I am deeply fond of, and grateful to, the USA, (and especially Rutgers) for the chances and rewards it has given me, while never losing my affection for my native British Isles. I hope you enjoy my books. Thank you.
On board the Lunar-C, a racing catboat adapted as a gaff-rigged sloop, Sanibel, FL.
Deep thanks to Charles Reina (who took the photo) Chuck Papier, Cornelia, Judy and all the Sandpipers.