LONGER  BIO

The following section starts as a publisher's summary, so please bear with the impersonal style.

Robin Fox was born in the Yorkshire Dales at the height of the Great Depression in 1934. His first home was in the Brontë village of Haworth (the hamlet of Crossroads) in the Pennines of West Yorkshire.  He had very little formal schooling during WWII, moving all over England with his soldier father (ex-Indian Army - landed in Normandy on D2)  and his mother, then an army nursing aide. (See the dedication to Kinship and Marriage.) The Church of England, the Army, public libraries, the Cubs and Scouts and the BBC, substituted for school. He survived a close encounter with a German bomb in Hull, then through a series of scholarships (including one to the Grammar School in the village of Thornton where the Brontës were born and Billie Whitelaw was a pupil) he made his way to the London School of Economics in1953 (State Scholarship). He did his undergraduate degree in Sociology (B.Sc. 1st class honors) including a heavy dose of Philosophy (Karl Popper, Ernest Gellner, Morris Ginsberg) and Social Anthropology (Raymond Firth, Isaac Shapera, Maurice Freedman.)

He went to Harvard University for graduate work in the Department of Social Relations (Clyde Kluckhohn, Dell Hymes, Paul Friedrich) and - through the good offices of Evon Vogt - 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 (London University - external examiner Edmund Leach) a revised version of which was published as The Keresan Bridge: A Problem in Pueblo Ethnology, 1967.  He worked for one year as a research associate with John Whiting at the Harvard Laboratory of Human Development (Palfrey House).

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 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.)  He published what became a seminal paper "Sibling Incest" in the British Journal of Sociology (1962), where he revived the work on incest avoidance of Edward Westermarck and coined the term "Westermarck effect" (as opposed  to "Freud effect"): a term now standard in anthropology.

Under the influence of such figures as John Bowlby, David Attenborough (his student for a while) Robert Ardrey, Niko Tinbergen, Desmond Morris (then curator of mammals at the London Zoo), primatologists John Napier and Michael Chance, and Canadian sociologist 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. He and Napier jointly taught a course on non-human primate societies, the first of its kind at the School.  He and Tiger helped Attenborough and Morris launch their venture into human behavior in their LIFE: In the Animal World, BBC TV program. 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 - including the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies,  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 an academic year at Stanford University School of Medicine  (Department of Psychiatry) as an NIMH special 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. (See "Guggenheim Foundation")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, Jane Goodall, Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, Napoleon Chagnon, Michael McGuire (who discovered the correlation between rank and serotonin), Robert Sapolsky, Martin Daly, and Herb Terrace and the chimpanzee Nim. It also included such people as Daniel Kahneman, who received the Nobel Prize for economic sciences in 2003,  Eugene Redmond and the now famous International Primate Research Center on St. Kitts WI, and  leading  kin-selection theorist W. D. Hamilton with whom he helped to found the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (1988).

He and Tiger worked for twelve years with the Foundation, sharing time with Rutgers, and during that time he did original research among Macaque monkeys on  an island off 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 (Institute of Social Anthropology), Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), California at San Diego, and the Universidad de los Andes in Bogatá, Colombia, where he did a participant observer stint as a bullfighter. (See "The Bulls"  in Participant Observer.) 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 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, with Francis Fukuyama and Amnesty International ("Is there a human right to revenge?")

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(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 among 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 "Participant Observer" under "Publications").

Readers may note in glancing at  my CV that 1997 and the years after showed a break in active participation in the academic world.  The 'reactive arthritis' (it used to be called 'Reiter's Syndrome') that had first been diagnosed in my late thirties became a total hindrance to travel and adventure and led to heart problems that laid me pretty low and left me weak.   Enough of that, but curious readers might wonder so I tell it. It cut me off from several interesting possibilities like the Board of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany which required too much travel. It  coincided with my distancing  from the American Anthropological Association and its continuing retreat from science and its political persecution of Napoleon Chagnon.

Meanwhile I live near Princeton, New Jersey, on a small farm (corn, rye, soybeans,  timber, bees, wildlife - including a family of foxes, a herd of deer and a clan of marauding woodchucks) with my wife Lin, a former associate professor of health sciences at Kean University NJ. (See the dedication to The Passionate Mind. - originally The Violent Imagination).   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 - see "Verse/Art"), music (choral singing - from barbershop to oratorio, classical guitar, songwriting,) and follow college football, especially the Scarlet Knights: an acquired passion replacing ancestral Rugby.

Lin, who was a longstanding member of the U. S. Green Building Council, developed a 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 and is now the author of the best-selling memoir Do No Harm, and its sequel Admissions.  Anne, having studied Russian at George Washington University and in the old USSR (Leningrad State University)  founded and runs Galahad SMS Ltd., a social-science research firm. She 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 (and now two great-grandsons). She and they speak fluent Arabic. They were rescued from the beaches in the great escape of 2006 and now live in New Jersey. (See the dedication to Reproduction and Succession.)

I have recently worked on a revised view of the advantages of inbreeding and the relationship between consanguinity and fertility (with M. L. Herbert) , on animal dispersion and human sectarianism, and the origins and failures of civilization. I have, thanks to the courageous work of younger scholars, found a renewed interest in Amerindian languages and what they can tell us about the history of the American Southwest.  I have most recently taught  courses 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 "Publications")

I am also working on my interest in the Shakespeare authorship question ( I favor Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as the alternative candidate)  especially his possible education and the role of the Grammar Schools in the making of the Tudor miracle and the modern world. A book of essays on the issue has been published as Shakespeare's Education. A festschrift edited by Michael Egan is called The Character of Human Institutions. (See "Publications")

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 (where I have spent the last 50 years and only reluctantly mooted retirement ) for the chances and rewards it has given me, while never losing my affection for my native British Isles. To crown the whole unlikely episode, in April 2013 I was elected a member of the US  National Academy of Sciences, the highest honor the national community of scientists can bestow: an especially moving moment of acceptance and recognition for an immigrant!  

I hope you enjoy my ideas and read my books. Thank you.