What is Robin Fox reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Robin Fox, author of The Tribal Imagination.

His entry begins:

It is always delightful to discover a new author (like a new composer – I found Alberto Ginestera for example) and I lighted on Barbara Kingsolver through a friend who loaned me her The Lacuna when I was sick. I followed up with The Poisonwood Bible – a sustained piece of virtuoso writing about Africa in three voices. I did Pigs in Clover and am now on Animal Dreams: about the Southwest, which I love, including Pueblo Indians of the tribes I studied. She is an unbelievably good writer with humor and metaphor and a gripping story. You don’t have to be a liberal activist to enjoy her, but...[read on]

Among the early praise for The Tribal Imagination:

“In The Tribal Imagination, Robin Fox brings to bear stunning insights from his wide knowledge of human societies and the philosophers, poets, and thinkers who have tried to understand them. He casts brilliant light not just on the human historical experience, but on contemporary issues from Iraq to human rights as well.”
—Francis Fukuyama, author of The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

“One of our most prolific and brilliant anthropologists has done it again. Marriage rules of simple societies, the rise of civilization, modern international politics, and literary examples ranging from the Bible and Greek mythology to Shakespeare and children’s rhymes are all grist for Robin Fox’s mill, which grinds out a fine understanding of how human groups function, given the Darwinian imperatives operating in history, the dynamics of family relationships, and the possibilities and limitations of the human brain.”
—Melvin Konner, author of The Evolution of Childhood

“The Tribal Imagination is an elegant demonstration that human nature is omnipresent in the symbolic realm and that knowing about this is the best way to make sense not only of humankind’s unity but of its diversity as well.”
—Bernard Chapais, author of Primeval Kinship: How Pair Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society

Learn more about the book and author at Robin Fox's website.

Robin Fox, anthropologist, poet, and essayist, is University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers University and author of Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective and The Red Lamp of Incest: An Enquiry into the Origins of Mind and Society.

The Page 99 Test: The Tribal Imagination.

Writers Read: Robin Fox.

--Marshal Zeringue