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Credit: Courtesy of Robin Fox
A young Robin Fox looks across the ocean
he traversed to become a transatlantic
transplant
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He was there as it unfolded, chronicling his trek through life and science, ever the anthropologist who simultaneously participates in and observes the course of events and the fabric of society.
In his autobiography, “Participant Observer,” Robin Fox, university professor of anthropology, New Brunswick, narrates a tale in the third person that recounts a youth in the north of England during the Great Depression. The book (Transaction Publishers 2004) carries the reader through four decades of the 20th century on a historical and intellectual journey covering both sides of the Atlantic.
“Some of us,” Fox says, “stumble accidentally onto the stage of big ideas and their related events.” Such ideas and events are the substance of Fox’s story – a story about which he says, “at the very least might be entertaining, at the most instructive, and never less than curious.”
In the process of telling his personal story, Fox traces the growth of anthropology on its path from adolescence as seen through the eyes of one who helped shape its very nature. But it is much more than that. It is a story of the times and the people, of family and friends, and of changing attitudes and perceptions.
Particularly noteworthy are Fox’s accounts of his early days at Rutgers. Already an anthropologist of some repute, he accepted an offer in 1967 to start up a new department within the newly created Livingston College.
Fox’s describes a cast of characters that included a dean who promised the college would become “the MIT of the social sciences” and a university president, Mason Gross, whom he calls “a man of dignity and honor.” He paints a picture of the academic set in the unsettled 1970s and coming to grips with the challenges he faced in his new role.
Fox relies on reminiscences that communicate the emotion of the moment with an implied wink or smirk and even the occasional scowl. He also injects a healthy dose of the exotic through his accounts of time spent among the Celtic fisherman of Ireland’s Tory Island and the native peoples of the American Southwest – the Navajo, the Hopi and the Rio Grande Pueblos – as well as bullfighting in Colombia.
More than one reviewer has noted a similarity between Fox’s literary style and that of James Joyce, but the Joycean comparison extends to other aspects of the memoir as well. Fellow Rutgers anthropologist and longtime Fox collaborator Lionel Tiger has written, “The comparison [with Joyce] is apt, especially in the way both authors treat the subject of religion, belief, personal integrity, and swirling eddies of doubt about granite assertions of faith.”
While the reader might benefit from a familiarity with anthropology, as Rutgers Research Anthropology Professor Helen Fisher says, “It’s a grand read: learned and an awful lot of fun.”
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