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Participant Observer - A Memoir of a Transatlantic Life (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R4,197
Discovery Miles 41 970
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Participant Observer - A Memoir of a Transatlantic Life (Hardcover, New)
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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.
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