Kate Fox | |
---|---|
Nationality | British |
Spouses | |
Parent | Robin Fox (father) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Trinity Hall, Cambridge |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Social anthropologist |
Institutions | MCM Research Ltd. Social Issues Research Centre |
Website | www |
Kate Fox is a British social anthropologist,co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) [1] and a Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Research. [2] She has written several books,including Watching the English:The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour .
Kate Fox is the daughter of anthropologist Robin Fox. As a child she lived in the UK,the United States,France,and Ireland. She studied for an undergraduate degree in anthropology and philosophy at Trinity Hall,Cambridge. [3] In 1989 she became co-director of MCM Research Ltd.,and continues to provide consulting services. [4] [5] She is now a co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre,based in Oxford,England. [6]
Recent topics include social effects of alcohol [7] and the purposes of small talk. [8] Fox is currently writing a book that "examine[s] many aspects of 21st-century life and obsessions - including mobile phones,social media,online dating,shopping,celebrity,reality TV,computer games,selfies,etc - from an evolutionary/anthropological perspective". [9]
In 2004,Fox married the neurosurgeon and acclaimed author Henry Marsh, [10] having been previously married to Peter Kibby (during which time she was credited as Kate Fox Kibby). [11]
Fox has written a number of books,including:
Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.
In anthropology, folkloristics, and the social and behavioral sciences, emic and etic refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained.
In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that the study of kinship is the study of what humans do with these basic facts of life – mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship etc. Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are "working with the same raw material as exists in the animal world, but [we] can conceptualize and categorize it to serve social ends." These social ends include the socialization of children and the formation of basic economic, political and religious groups.
Ethnolinguistics is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language and the nonlinguistic cultural behavior of the people who speak that language.
Drinking culture is the set of traditions and social behaviors that surround the consumption of alcoholic beverages as a recreational drug and social lubricant. Although alcoholic beverages and social attitudes toward drinking vary around the world, nearly every civilization has independently discovered the processes of brewing beer, fermenting wine and distilling spirits.
Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology.
U and non-U English usage, where "U" stands for upper class, and "non-U" represents the aspiring middle classes, was part of the terminology of popular discourse of social dialects (sociolects) in Britain in the 1950s. The different vocabularies can often appear quite counter-intuitive: the middle classes prefer "fancy" or fashionable words, even neologisms and often euphemisms, in attempts to make themselves sound more refined, while the upper classes in many cases stick to the same plain and traditional words that the working classes also use, as, confident in the security of their social position, they have no need to seek to display refinement.
The Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) is a non-profit think tank working on social and lifestyle issues. It is based in Oxford, but is not part of, and has no relationship to, Oxford University.
A round of drinks is a set of alcoholic beverages purchased by one person in a group for that complete group. The purchaser buys the round of drinks as a single order at the bar. In many places it is customary for people to take turns buying rounds.
Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across disciplines. For example, biologists who conduct field research may simply observe animals interacting with their environments, whereas social scientists conducting field research may interview or observe people in their natural environments to learn their languages, folklore, and social structures.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Dame Ann Marilyn Strathern, DBE, FBA is a British anthropologist, who has worked largely with the Mount Hagen people of Papua New Guinea and dealt with issues in the UK of reproductive technologies. She was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge from 1993 to 2008, and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge from 1998 to 2009.
Legal anthropology, also known as the anthropology of laws, is a sub-discipline of anthropology follows inter disciplinary approach which specializes in "the cross-cultural study of social ordering". The questions that Legal Anthropologists seek to answer concern how is law present in cultures? How does it manifest? How may anthropologists contribute to understandings of law?
Robin Fox is an Anglo-American anthropologist who has written on the topics of incest avoidance, marriage systems, human and primate kinship systems, evolutionary anthropology, sociology and the history of ideas in the social sciences. He founded the department of anthropology at Rutgers University in 1967 and had remained a professor there for the rest of his career, also being a director of research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation from 1972 to 1984.
Adrienne Lois Kaeppler was an American anthropologist, curator of oceanic ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. She served as the President of the International Council on Traditional Music between 2005 and 2013. Her research focused on the interrelationships between social structure and the arts, including dance, music, and the visual arts, especially in Tonga and Hawaii. She was considered to be an expert on Tongan dance, and the voyages of the 18th-century explorer James Cook.
Catherine "Kay" S. Fowler is an anthropologist whose work has focused on preserving the cultures of the native people of the Great Basin. She earned her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, and from 1964 to 2007 taught at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she is now Professor Emerita.
Microculture refers to the specialised subgroups, marked with their own languages, ethos and rule expectations, that permeate differentiated industrial societies.
Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour is a 2004 international bestseller by Kate Fox, a leading social anthropologist. The book examines "typical" English behaviour.
Ruth Mace FBA is a British anthropologist, biologist, and academic. She specialises in the evolutionary ecology of human demography and life history, and phylogenetic approaches to culture and language evolution. Since 2004, she has been Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at University College London.