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| Transaction Publishers 2004 ISBN; 0-7658-0133-7 Cloth: 565 pp. $39.95 / £25.95 orders@transactionpub.com / www.amazon.com / see Contact for further ordering details orders@edspubs.co.uk |
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| Participant Observer is the story of how Robin Fox, now one of the most prominent anthropologists of our time, born in England in the Depression, managed against the odds to get to the point described by David Attenborough: at the London School of Economics in the mid-sixties. It goes on to tell how he went on from there to become a pioneer of what Robert Ardrey called “the revolution in the social sciences” - the revolution that, after a hundred years, took Darwin seriously in the study of behavior.
In the autobiographical tradition of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, but crossed with a good dose of Angela’s Ashes, Fox, acting as the independent narrator of his own life, takes us on an exuberant romp through the thirties to the seventies of last century, over several continents but mainly Europe and America. It is a personal, historical and intellectual journey, which is at once intriguing, hilarious and moving. Without ever mentioning his own name, or any dates, he looks for all the impingements that caused the protean shifts in this sprawling mini-saga of the adventures of a child of the meritocracy. From the proverbial humble beginnings, in a family whose income was “a shilling a week less than Frank McCourt’s” he became one of those at the center of the great debate of the century: the contention about the nature of human nature in a world that had learned, or failed to learn, from Darwin. But it was a long road, peppered with strange events, brain-bending ideas, odd adventures, dangers and sorrows, loves and losses, and a spectacular cast of lively – often very strange – characters. From Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky, to Margaret Mead and Konrad Lorenz, via William Fulbright, Kingsley Amis, and Lionel Tiger, among many, many others. Throughout all this he floats, like Christopher Isherwood’s camera, at once observant and baffled, interested and amazed, sympathetic and cynical, but eternally curious. He feels he has been the observer of a series of endings: the last gasps of now extinct ways of life. He saw the last of the old steam-powered northern-English wool towns of the industrial revolution; of the pre-industrial Hardy countryside of southern England; of the ancient Grammar Schools before their destruction by doctrinaire socialism; of the old London School of Economics when it was still an international family, not just a big college; of the brave but failed experiment that was Talcott Parsons’ Social Relations Department at Harvard; of the innocent but troubled America of the fifties; of the last gasp of traditional Indian life in New Mexico; of “genteel Jane Austen England” in Devon; of peasant-crofter life in the Gaelic-speaking Irish islands; of the old American rah-rah men’s college at Rutgers and Princeton; of the amateur bullfight in provincial South America; of the intimate and eccentric world of anthropology before its rapid expansion in the seventies; and of the whole “deferential society” wounded in the sixties and seventies, and beginning to be erased by political correctness and egalitarian dumbing down in a world changed utterly by the baby boom, the pill and Vietnam.
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| OUTLINE
Ch 1. The Child: Dancing for the Woolworth Ladies He takes us from the original, archetypal, Woolworth Ladies, selling broken loose biscuits during the depression years, in the Yorkshire dales . Having barely survived at birth, he appears on a newsreel, then wanders through the England of WWII, has a narrow escape from death, and finds sanctuary with the soldiers (including the Americans.) There follows education in the Church of England (a passion for the Anglican funeral service, and rote learning for Sunday School prizes), a mystical religious epiphany in the church choirstalls, another near death experience, and the keen desire to become a vicar in order to escape the inevitable flames of hell. This all leads to a surprise scholarship to an ancient Grammar School in the Brontë birthplace. (The Brontës haunt his life and imagination, especially the failure, Branwell.) Ch. 2. The Boy: Making it to the Next Foxhole He remembers in amazing and funny detail his years as a schoolboy, and writes a loving hymn of praise to these now-abolished Grammar Schools, whose cricketing code of morals was about the best guide to decent behavior available to young boys, or ex-colonial peoples for that matter. He was only interested in music and sports, sang in a record number of Messiahs, and played illegal amateur rugby league. He played truant in order to read what he liked (in the Bradford covered market where he lived on pork pies and chain-drank mugs of tea.) Ch. 3. The Youth: Coming in on Roller Skates He suffered a sudden religious de-conversion, and obsessed with the desire to become a journalist immediately, he almost blew his chances for any educational advancement. Injury (fortunately) cut short his rugby career. He was rescued by kind but tough teachers, and ended up, after discovering Catholic girls, ballroom dancing, Conservative politics, Rationalism, Bertrand Russell, Sir James Frazer (via T.S. Eliot and the Unitarian Church), the theater, Existentialism, Economics and jazz, with yet another scholarship, this time to the London School of Economics. Ch. 4. The Student: Putting on the Masks His years at the LSE are described with nostalgic affection, dominated by London jazz bands (Lonnie Donnegan and skiffle – the origin of the Beatles) and student politics (including a debate in support of Enoch Powell.) He veers between the Logical Positivism of A. J. Ayer, the methodology of Karl Popper, Functionalist Anthropology, quarrels with the local Marxists, student reviews, student journalism, the Spanish guitar (via John Williams) verse drama, tentative sex, and beer. The Suez crisis saw him clubbed by the police, carried into the House of Commons, and disillusioned with the Conservative Party. He got married, and escaped the draft via another scholarship, this time to Harvard, although this was only because the Philosophy department at Cornell reneged. Ch. 5. The Novice: Mixing with the Yeast Enzymes The Harvard of the fifties and the Social Relations Department proved bewildering but exhilarating, with strange professors, multiple requirements and odd doctrines, including the pervading Freudianism. The ambience of this now extinct experiment conducted by Talcott Parsons is meticulously recreated. It includes the influence of B.F. Skinner and Behaviorism, cognitive dissonance, culture and personality, and interaction process analysis, along with a passion for American food (the Howard Johnson student 99 cent lunch figures here), a visit from Fidel Castro, lunches with James B. Watson, and cocktails with JFK. Ch. 6. The Initiate: Journeying Through Wonderland The pace was punishing, but he was rescued from total despair by the science of Linguistics, and took to it with the passion of a convert, including the early words of the young Noam Chomsky at MIT. This led to a chance to do fieldwork in New Mexico and a trip in an old Ford through the wonderland of the USA via ‘occupied Arkansas,’ the bug infested Texas panhandle, and the ‘great wall’ of the Rockies, to the Pueblo of Cochiti on the Rio Grande. Life with the Indians, studying their kinship, ritual and language, and being cured of dysentery by the medicine men (and harassed by the Santa Fe hospital bureaucracy), leads to trips to all over the Southwest, and a growing conviction that he perhaps might just make an anthropologist after all. Returning to Harvard he teams up with John Whiting at the Laboratory of Social Development and learns the cross-cultural method while developing ideas about the incest taboo. A job offer from the University of Exeter sends him reeling back to England, again unprepared, and uncertain just what he is doing. Ch. 7. The Apprentice: Letting the Soul Catch Up Exeter, the last outpost of ‘genteel Jane Austen England’ sees him with a frantic teaching load, a running argument with the New Left Review Study Group, an entry into Liberal politics, cricket with the faculty team (average age 55), the founding of the weekly New Society, and the influence of John Bowlby who tells him about ‘Ethology’ and is excited by his theory that the mother-child bond, not the nuclear family, is the basic unit of kinship. But all is eclipsed by a chance visit, while looking for Gaelic speakers to study bilingualism, to Tory Island in Donegal. The Tory Islanders, with their King, their clans, and their custom of not living together on marriage, become his next obsession, along with the birth of two daughters. He publishes a seminal paper on ‘Sibling Incest’ (involving a ‘law of incest avoidance’) and is invited by Raymond Firth to join the Social Anthropology department at the LSE. Ch. 8. The Idea: Challenging the Dominant Males Back in his old haunt, and established, somewhat to his alarm, as an ‘expert’ on the incest taboo, he is given a graduate student to supervise called David Attenborough and ends up becoming a member of the London Zoo and Desmond Morris’s seminar there. Firth makes him lecture on kinship (he wanted to do linguistics) and some students show their notes to a Penguin Books editor, who signs him up to write a book. He writes a thesis on Cochiti (examined by Edmund Leach), has a third daughter, reads Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis and has another conversion experience, joins Morris’s team producing the BBC’s Life program, and copes with Derek Freeman’s distaste for Margaret Mead. Ch. 9. The Career: Telling God Your Plans Once again dangerously under informed, he lands in the middle of the Newark riots and finds that what was to become ‘the MIT of the social sciences’ is turning into an attempt at instant social reform. He sees the last of the old men’s college campus morph into the co-ed dorms, long hair and psychedelic/radical culture, and the corruption of everything by the Vietnam War. He is trapped with a Dean who is ‘veridically challenged’ and colleagues with radical agendas. He likes college football. He meets E. O. Wilson, and Joe Alsop, writes for the New York Times, interviews Margaret Mead, and gives evidence at a presidential commission. He delivers ‘The Cultural Animal’ as a lecture, and the response makes him realize he has walked into an intellectual minefield. He goes to California (Stanford and Berkeley), studies brains and mixes with hippies. Ch. 10. The Book: Engaging the Living Fossils He and Tiger begin to write a book, which comes out as The Imperial Animal and gets them a lot of popular attention and a lot more academic attacks and feminist vitriol. They are condemned by the Ruth Benedict Collective in New York, heckled by Trotskyites and transvestites on BBC television, and caught up in a drunken singsong in Soho with Kingsley Amis.
Chs. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 The Dances: Communing with Strange Gods The stories involve first a tale of unreal wandering through a series of Indian dances – Navaho, Hopi, Zuni, Santo Domingo, ending with a psychedelic nightmare induced by peyote at Taos. Then there is a run in with the IRA in Donegal (smuggling a gunman past the British), with side visits to the Tory King in a Wexford jail, and a commissioner in Dublin with a strange theory of Irish surnames. Then a participation in a provincial bullfight in Colombia – another near disaster, with multilingual debates among politicians about who owns utopia. Then a series of memorable meals, in Paris, Israel, Rome and the Stockholm Opera House, where the ‘dynamic duo’ come close to bankrupting several foundations. Then there is an account in dialogue of a series of encounters with ‘the hetaerae’ – the new sexually liberated women on the loose at conferences: his colleagues whom he mistakes for expensive hookers.
Ch. 16 The Point: Connecting with the Teenage Murderer The year of reflection at Oxford – his fortieth, shows himself, society and the intellectual world at one of those turning points where a new cultural order is taking shape. The world of the Woolworth Ladies he grew up with is not going to be the world of the future. He ruminates on violence, and how ideas are more dangerous than instincts. He ponders the origins of mind and society, and how the evolution of incest inhibitions might help explain both. He redefines instinct in the hope of solving the nature/nurture problem. He fends off advances from the dons, and puts together a book on Biosocial Anthropology. He visits his children in the Alps, completes his book on the Tory Islanders, tells Ed. Wilson not to write the final chapter of Sociobiology, and survives – during the Tour de France - a bombing attack on a Basque cycle team by mysterious assailants linked to Franco. There it appropriately ends. SUMMARY There is no heavy hand of ‘research’ here; the story is told as it unfolds in his memory, which is capacious and detailed, but pointed and accurate, if a little hazy on chronology. Every page either raises a laugh, provokes a thought, or taps the emotions. It is always human, sometimes sad, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes hilarious, but never less than interesting. It is a kind of Cook’s Tour through the ideas and intellectual movements of mid-century, when the world changed and the foundations of the twenty-first century were set. It is the history of an education by a narrator in love with learning. Anyone who has had an education will be entranced, for the process has never been described like this before. To go on the author’s personal roller coaster ride (which he describes as 'fact loosely based on fiction') through this turbulent time is to understand better what we came from and where we are heading, but never in the process to be preached at. One reader described it as ‘the thinking man’s Angela’s Ashes’ – except that it is a lot more believable, a lot more informative, and a lot funnier.
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