Robin Fox

I was drawn to anthropology through early reading about history and civilization, and by religious doubts as a teenager. (I had been a pious Church of England boy.) My mother gave me H. G. Well's "Outine of History" when I was a teenager and I read T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" with its references to ritual and Sir James Frazer. I did a sociology degree at the LSE specializing in social philosophy and social anthropology, then went for two years to Harvard. While there I went out to New Mexico and fell in love with the Pueblo Indians. Back in the UK I did fieldwork on Gaelic-speaking Tory Island in NW Donegal. I wrote "Kinship and Marriage" which is perhaps the world's most widely used book on that topic. After meeting Lionel Tiger (at the London Zoo) I became interested in Darwinism and the evolution of behavior. Together we moved to Rutgers University in New Jersey and have been there ever since. We wrote "The Imperial Animal" which brought mild notoriety and helped change the social sciences in an evolutionary direction. I have studied the brain at Stanford and Macaque monkeys in Bermuda, written poetry and essays, and continue to enjoy teaching and research and writing (including a book about Shakespeare.). In 2013 I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Anthropology is for me full of great insights, but also a lot of fun. See my website at www.robin-fox.com for more details - and more fun stuff.