ABSTRACT
The challenge in writing about Robin Fox's professional life is that the only person who can with proper perspective and adequate breadth account for it is the man himself. He would install himself in one of the characteristic separate third-class carriages of English trains and therein work, for one thing, on his manuscript for his fundamental and classic text Kinship and Marriage. It is clearly humble and not boastful to recall what T. S. Eliot wrote in a dedication to Ezra Pound: "Il miglior fabbro". Working with Fox was always vivacious and efficient. Clifford Geertz had perhaps the best and certainly the most prestigious job in the social sciences and motivated a bilious billow of self-righteous postmodernism that sharply limited his and the discipline's impact on real knowledge.
