A01=Robin Fox
academic memoirs
Au Pair Girl
Author_Robin Fox
biosocial anthropology
Blue Berries
Bolo Ties
Category=DNBM1
Category=JHM
Cerebro Spinal Meningitis
Chianti Classico
cultural evolution
El Gringo
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic fieldwork
Fine Day
Fly Swatter
George III
Green Corn
Green Corn Dance
history of social science education
Kachina Dance
Laugh Lines
Middle Aged Academic
National Library
Rio Grande Pueblos
Roller Skates
Sangre De Cristos Mountains
Scare Crows
Scottish Gaelic
social science revolution
sociobiology theory
Tight Rope Walker
Wild Duck
Woolworth Ladies
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9780765802385
- Weight: 1250g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2004
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Robin Fox, one of the preeminent anthropologists of our time, takes us on an exuberant personal, intellectual and cultural journey through the 1930s to the 1970s. This is a personal, historical, intellectual journey, one that is at once intriguing, hilarious, and moving. Like Browning's Sordello (who recurs throughout the book), Fox is telling the story of "the development of a soul." Fox's method is to depend entirely on memory to select the people, events, and ideas that have driven him towards what was called at the time a "revolution in the social sciences." This revolution was the founding of the biosocial, or what came to be called the sociobiological, movement in the study of human behavior. It was a long road peppered with strange events, brain-bending ideas, odd adventures, dangers and sorrows, and a cast of lively, often eccentric characters.Fox describes himself as an observer of a series of endings: the last gasps of now extinct ways of life. He witnessed the last of the old steam and horse-powered northern wool towns of the industrial revolution and the pre-industrial Hardy countryside of southern England. He saw the ancient grammar schools before their destruction by doctrinaire socialism; the old LSE when it was still an international family, not just a big college; the brave but failed experiment that was Talcott Parsons' Social Relations Department. In the United States, he experienced the innocent but troubled America of the 1950s and the last gasp of traditional Indian life in New Mexico. He lived in genteel Jane Austen England in Devon and experienced peasant-crofter life in the Irish islands.Participant Observer is a report from the cultural and social battlefront, seen through the personal lens of a combatant. Fox has given us a kind of Cook's Tour through the ideas and intellectual movements of mid-century, when the world changed and the foundations of the twenty-first century were set. It is the history of an education by a narrator in love with learning.
