“I listened, jaw-sagging, as a brilliant young anthropologist, Robin Fox, lectured on the intricacies of kinship systems.”
     David Attenborough, Life on Air: Memoir of a Broadcaster  (2002)

Participant Observer is the story of how Robin Fox, now one of the most prominent anthropologists of our time, born in England 'on the dole' in the Great 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.

Humble Beginnings

From the proverbial humble beginnings in the Yorkshire Dales, in a family whose income (the dole) 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.

Last  Gasps
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 and the moorland sheep-herding life that still surrounded them; of the pre-industrial farm-and-village Thomas 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 and the Southwest; of “genteel Jane Austen England” in Devon; of peasant-crofter-fishing 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.

 

Name Dropping
There is no index since many of the characters appear with only first names or epithets (“The Dean” – “The Vicar”) especially in the early chapters where they approach mythological status. The following are some of the better-known people encountered, in academia, politics, literature, entertainment, music, society and media, making (sometimes consequential, sometimes fleeting) appearances in Participant Observer:

…Billie Whitelaw, Harold Macmillan, H.R.H  King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Glenn Miller, Frank Bullock, Raymond Firth, T. H. Marshall, Maurice Freedman, Isaac Schapera, Lucy Mair, Morris Ginsberg, Max Gluckman, Lonnie Donegan, Karl Po p per, Ernest Gellner, A. J. Ayer, Lucian Freud, Michael Oakeshott, Enoch Powell, Bertrand Russell, Peter O’Toole,  Peter Cattaneo, Tony Cattaneo, Julian Pitt-Rivers, John Barnes, Daryll Forde, Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, Mary Douglas, Kenneth Oakley, Michael Chance, Leonard Williams, John Williams, Evon Vogt, Clyde Kluckhohn, Douglas Oliver, The Aga Khan, B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, James Watson,  Tom Lehrer, Paul Friedrich,  Kim Romney, William Howells, Talcott Parsons, Robert Bales,  George Homans, Dell Hymes, John  F. Kennedy, John Whiting, Laura Nader, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Roy D’Andrade, Francis Fergusson, Fidel Castro, Archibald MacLeish, Fred Eggan, Byron Harvey III, Nelson Jay, Esther Goldfrank, D. J. O’Connor, John Bowlby, Derek Hill, Peter Watkins, David Glass, Michael Young,  Joan Bakewell, Keith Hopkins, John Griffith, John Hajnal,  Patrick Bateson, Victor Turner, Dominic Behan,  Lord Raglan, Burton Benedict, William Golding, Charles Hart, Lionel Tiger, Virginia Tiger, John Napier, Les Hiatt, Julian Huxley, Cybill Shepherd,  Ernst Caspari, Joanne Woodward, Barbara Walters, Niko Tinbergen, Nathaniel Tarn, Trevor (Lord) Smith,  Earl Castle Stewart,  William Fulbright, Anthony Forge, Francis Huxley,  Frederick Turner,  Clement Heller, Jacques Monod,  Elzbeth Monod, Claude Levi-Strauss, Alex Comfort, David Attenborough, Milton Eisenhower, Desmond Morris, Jane Goodall, Louis Malle, Robert Ardrey, Ashley Montagu, Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, Alan Lomax,  David Schneider, Lord Longford, Andrew Marshall , Conor Cruise O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Rodney Needham, Kingsley Amis, Alexander Heffner, Mason Gross, Noel Annan, Godfrey Lienhardt, Iris Murdoch,   E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Prince and Princess of Liège,  Colin Turnbull, Alexander Marshak, Robert J. Lifton, Jonathan Winson, Richard Lee, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pierre Boulez, Jane Lancaster, Karyl Roosevelt, John Pfeiffer, Melvin Konner, Yehudi Cohen, Massimo Piateli-Palmarini,  Bob Guccionne,  Merv Griffin, Irven DeVore, Richard de Mille, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Stuart Hampshire, Konrad Lorenz, William Golding, Erving Goffman, Jean Martinon, Jacques Mehler, Saul Bellow,  Adam Bellow, Countess of Hardwicke, Jean de Rothschild,  Evelynne Sullerot, Peter Vayda, Susan Sontag, Richard Lee, Omar Shariff, Napoleon Chagnon,  Maurice Girodias, Alex Shoumattoff, Prince Poniatowski,  Conrad Arensberg, Irving Kristol, Mel Lasky,  Irving  Horowitz, Mario Laserna, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Bill Kristol,   Richard Poirier, Mason Gross,  Charles Lindberg, Harry Frank  Guggenheim, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Marvin Harris, Daniel Bell, Richard Rorty, Tom Khun, Clifford Geertz, Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Curtin, Francis Fukuyama,  Robert Fagles,  Joe Namath, Jack Dempsey, Alfonso Ortiz, Joe Alsop, David Hamburg, Iraneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Baronessa Ricasoli, Karl Pribram,  Arianna Stassinopoulos  Huffington,  David Hamburg, Sherwood Washburn, Jilly Cooper, Edmund Leach,  A. L.  Rowse, Doris Lessing, Meyer Fortes, Leonard Cohen, Suzanne Grossman, Howard Bloom, Tony Jay, Isaiah Berlin, Jimmy Doolittle, James Gavin,  G. Edward Pendray, W. V. Quine, Jack Goody, Reo Fortune, Alister Hardy, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Murray Gell-Man, Barnaby Conrad, William Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, Gordon Getty, Ann Getty, Maurice Bowra, Phyllis Chesler, Helen Fisher, Mary-Beth Whitehead and 'Baby M',  E. O. Wilson, Sam Huntington, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, John Bolton ....

Some of these might be post-Participant.  Some day  (perhaps)  I'll check. RF