He is a distinguished research professor emeritus of anthropology at Northern Illinois University.
[2] Brown attended Tulane University for his undergraduate and graduate degrees, receiving a B.A.
Brown conducted fieldwork with the Huastec people, a Mayan group of northern Veracruz, Mexico.
He investigated cognitive anthropology of kinship, color, disease, plants, and animals.
[5] He was a visiting scientist in the linguistics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in 2001.