An Interview with Richard G. Fox

Abstract

Introduction: Richard G. Fox has been a leading figure in anthropology for more than three decades. Born in 1939 in New York City to a family of European immigrants, Fox grew up mostly in Cincinnati. He returned to New York to attend Columbia University as an undergraduate. Fox is well known for his work in India; he carried out his first fieldwork there in 1963 for his anthropology doctorate at the University of Michigan. This and subsequent work in South Asia led to a series of influential books including From Zamindar to Ballot Box: Community Change in a North Indian Market (1969a), Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (1985), and Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture (1989). Yet Fox has also helped to shape larger debates in anthropology about nationalism and nationalist ideologies, colonialism, social movements, urban experience, and the dynamics of cultural invention and change. He was a professor at Brandeis University, Duke University, and Washington University and edited American Ethnologist and, later, Current Anthropology. Fox was the president of the WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research from 2000 until retiring in 2005. His many honors include fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study and from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.