Robin Fox (born 1934) is an Anglo-American

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

who has written on the topics of incest avoidance, marriage systems, human and

primate Primates are a diverse order of mammals. They are divided into the strepsirrhines, which include the lemurs, galagos, and lorisids, and the haplorhines, which include the tarsiers and the simians (monkeys and apes, the latter including huma ...

kinship In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that ...

systems,

evolutionary anthropology Evolutionary anthropology, the interdisciplinary study of the evolution of human physiology and human behaviour and of the relation between hominids and non-hominid primates, builds on natural science and on social science. Various fields and ...

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...

and the

history of ideas Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual his ...

in the social sciences. He founded the department of anthropology at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

in 1967 and had 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 Lionel Tiger (born February 5, 1937) is a Canadian-American anthropologist. He is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and co-Research Director of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Early life and education Born ...

in 1971 one of the earliest to advocate and demonstrate an evolutionary approach to the understanding of human social behaviour. His daughter

Kate Fox Kate Fox is a British social anthropologist, co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) and a Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Research. She has written several books, including '' Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of Engl ...

wrote the book ''Watching the English.'' In 2013 Fox was elected to the

US National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Natio ...

(Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology).

Life and work

Robin Fox was born in the village of

Haworth Haworth () is a village in the City of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, in the Pennines, south-west of Keighley, west of Bradford and east of Colne in Lancashire. The surrounding areas include Oakworth and Oxenhope. Nearby villages inc ...

in the

Yorkshire Dales The Yorkshire Dales is an upland area of the Pennines in the historic county of Yorkshire, England, most of it in the Yorkshire Dales National Park created in 1954. The Dales comprise river valleys and the hills rising from the Vale of York w ...

, at the nadir of the Great Depression in 1934. He had very little schooling during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, moving all over England with his soldier father (ex-

Indian Army The Indian Army is the land-based branch and the largest component of the Indian Armed Forces. The President of India is the Supreme Commander of the Indian Army, and its professional head is the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), who is a four- ...

), 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 A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching Latin, but more recently an academically oriented secondary school ...

Thornton, West Yorkshire Thornton is a village within the metropolitan borough of the City of Bradford, in West Yorkshire, England. It lies to the west of Bradford, and together with neighbouring Allerton, has total resident population of 15,004, increasing to 17 ...

, he made his way to the

London School of Economics , mottoeng = To understand the causes of things , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £240.8 million (2021) , budget = £391.1 millio ...

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 Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the cl ...

Ernest Gellner Ernest André Gellner FRAI (9 December 1925 – 5 November 1995) was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by ''The Daily Telegraph'', when he died, as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals, and by ''The Ind ...

, and

Raymond Firth Sir Raymond William Firth (25 March 1901 – 22 February 2002) was an ethnologist from New Zealand. As a result of Firth's ethnographic work, actual behaviour of societies (social organization) is separated from the idealized rules of behaviou ...

—and occasional interaction with

Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...

. He went to Harvard for graduate work in the Department of Social Relations where he found himself under the tutelage of

Clyde Kluckhohn Clyde Kluckhohn (; January 11, 1905 in Le Mars, Iowa – July 28, 1960 near Santa Fe, New Mexico), was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the ...

Evon Vogt Evon Zartman Vogt, Jr. (August 18, 1918 – May 13, 2004) was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his work among the Tzotzil Mayas of Chiapas, Mexico. Vogt was the author of numerous articles and 19 books. He was a fellow of the A ...

, Paul Friedrich and Dell Hymes, in New Mexico, where he studied language and society among the

Pueblo Indians The Puebloans or Pueblo peoples, are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material, and religious practices. Currently 100 pueblos are actively inhabited, among which Taos, San Ildefonso, Acoma, Z ...

. He concentrated on the Pueblo of Cochiti, on the Rio Grande, on which he wrote his PhD thesis (submitted to the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

and examined by

, 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 The University of Exeter is a public university , public research university in Exeter, Devon, England, United Kingdom. Its predecessor institutions, St Luke's College, Exeter School of Science, Exeter School of Art, and the Camborne School of Min ...

, starting fieldwork on

Tory Island Tory Island, or simply Tory (officially known by its Irish name ''Toraigh''),Toraigh/Tory Island

County Donegal County Donegal ( ; ga, Contae Dhún na nGall) is a county of Ireland in the province of Ulster and in the Northern and Western Region. It is named after the town of Donegal in the south of the county. It has also been known as County Tyrconne ...

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 sco, Ulstèr Universitie , image = Ulster University coat of arms.png , caption = , motto_lang = , mottoeng = , latin_name = Universitas Ulidiae , established = 1865 – Magee College 1953 - Magee Un ...

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 Edvard Alexander Westermarck (Helsinki, 20 November 1862 – Tenala, 3 September 1939) was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. Biography Westermarck was born in 1862 in a wel ...

, coining the term "

Westermarck Effect The Westermarck effect, also known as reverse sexual imprinting, is a psychological hypothesis that people tend not to be attracted to peers with whom they lived like siblings before age six. This hypothesis was first proposed by Finnish anthr ...

". Under the influence of such figures as John Bowlby,

David Attenborough Sir David Frederick Attenborough (; born 8 May 1926) is an English broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, the nine natural histor ...

(who was his student for a while), Robert Ardrey,

Niko Tinbergen Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen (; ; 15 April 1907 – 21 December 1988) was a Dutch biologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning the or ...

Desmond Morris Desmond John Morris FLS ''hon. caus.'' (born 24 January 1928) is an English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter, as well as a popular author in human sociobiology. He is known for his 1967 book '' The Naked Ape'', and for his televis ...

, Michael Chance and

, he became interested in

ethology Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Behaviourism as a term also describes the scientific and objectiv ...

. 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 UCL Medical School is the medical school of University College London (UCL) and is located in London, United Kingdom. The School provides a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate medical education programmes and also has a medical educati ...

. 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 Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to examine and explain social behavior in terms of evolution. It draws from disciplines including psychology, ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics. Within t ...

. 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 The vervet monkey (''Chlorocebus pygerythrus''), or simply vervet, is an Old World monkey of the family Cercopithecidae native to Africa. The term "vervet" is also used to refer to all the members of the genus ''Chlorocebus''. The five distinct ...

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 Clifford James Geertz (; August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades. ...

, 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 Baby M (born March 27, 1986) was the pseudonym used in the case ''In re Baby M'', 537 A.2d 1227, 109 N.J. 396 (N.J. 1988) for the infant whose legal parentage was in question. Origins ''In re Baby M'' was a custody case that became the first Am ...

" 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 has 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 Democracy for the government of Iraq has been a long sought after goal by politicians, activists, and revolutionaries. It is considered to be a new, "fledgeling process" or phenomenon in Iraq, commonly afflicted by corruption, civil and ethnic con ...

, 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.) Since then Fox has written 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 is married to Lin Fox (Ed.D. Columbia) who taught Health Sciences at Kean University, New Jersey; they live on a small farm outside Princeton, New Jersey. He continues 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 The Calusa ( ) were a Native American people of Florida's southwest coast. Calusa society developed from that of archaic peoples of the Everglades region. Previous indigenous cultures had lived in the area for thousands of years. At the time of ...

Indians of SW Florida, and the evolutionary relationship between consanguineous marriage and fertility.

Books

* *(with

) * * * * * * * * * * * *

References

External links

Website
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Fox, Robin 1934 births Living people British anthropologists People from Haworth Alumni of the London School of Economics Rutgers University faculty 20th-century English writers 21st-century English writers Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences