Robin Fox

[2] 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.

He went to Harvard for graduate work in the Department of Social Relations where he found himself under the tutelage of Clyde Kluckhohn, Evon Vogt, Paul Friedrich and Dell Hymes, in New Mexico, where he studied language and society among the Pueblo Indians.

He concentrated on the Pueblo of Cochiti, on the Rio Grande, on which he wrote his PhD thesis (submitted to the University of London and examined by Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach and Daryll Ford).

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.

Under the influence of such figures as John Bowlby, David Attenborough (who was his student for a while), Robert Ardrey, Niko Tinbergen, Desmond Morris, Michael Chance and Lionel Tiger, he became interested in ethology.

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.

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.

He wrote The Search for Society (1989) his "equal time response" to the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz, and The Violent Imagination (1989), a book of essays, verse, satire, drama, and dialogue.