About the Book
In the Field, by Renee C. Fox, is a narrative account of the author's life as a sociologist. It is not a memoir in the conventional sense; rather, it is an ethnographic autobiography. Drawing on a vast reservoir of notes and documents that chronicle the span of her career, this work also focuses on the places Fox's field research has carried her.
Propelled by a conviction to move beyond the boundaries of herself and of her native land, Fox has done first-hand research in Europe, Central Africa, and China, as well as in the United States. The majority of her research has centered on health, illness, and medicine. Other recurrent themes that pervade her work include training for uncertainty; the allocation of scarce resources; the relationship between self and others; detachment and concern; the particular and the universal; the harm that can result from intended good; and the questions posed by illness and accident, pain and suffering, and death.
It is Fox's commitment as a teacher and mentor of generations of students that lies at the heart of this book. This volume will inspire new generations of social researchers.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Ethnography of the Life of a Sociologist
1. Origins and Beginnings
2. Growing up on West End Avenue
3. Freshman Year (1944-1945) at Smith College, and the Summer of 1945
4. Polio
5. The Year in Whittier
6. Return to Smith
7. Graduate School: The Harvard Department of Social Relations
8. Experiment Perilous
9. Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research and the Sociology of Medical Education Project
10. Teaching at Barnard College
11. The Summer of 1959: A Portal to Belgium
12. The Transforming Effects of Belgium on My Life: Part I
13. The Transforming Effects of Belgium on My Life: Part II
14. Africa: Leopoldville, Kisantu, and Usumbura
15. My Years in the Congo
16. Deciding to Leave Barnard
Photographs
17. Return to Harvard (1967-1969) 2
18. Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1969-)
19. A Sociologist in a Medical School
Miss Balkema's Death
20. Chairman Renee
21. China, 1978
Talcott Parsons's Death
22. China, 1981: Tianjin and the "Team of Two"
23. Bioethics: Refl ections of an Observing Participant
My Parents' Deaths
24. The 1990s: A Time of Consummation (I): "Knighthood"
25. The 1990s: A Time of Consummation: (II): Leaving the Field of Organ Replacement
26. Going Up to, and Coming Down from, Oxford
27. Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders: Medical Humanitarianism and Its Dilemmas
28. Retiring
29. Willy's Last Days
30. Becoming Eighty
Envoi
Index
Review :
-After having read RenEe Fox's memoir, one is convinced that her life is definitely a novel, which takes the reader from her Russian grandparents immigrating to America to her study of the action of Doctors Without Borders in Moscow, from her New York public school years to her endowed professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, from her survey of students at Cornell Medical School to her study of organ replacement in the Harvard Program on Technology and Society, from her experience of polio as an adolescent to the discovery of her breast cancer as an adult, from Belgium to Congo, and from China to South Africa. Her life covers most of the twentieth century and spreads over four continents. Her role in the making of medical sociology is valuable and influential. . . . A rich documentation of RenEe Fox's exceptional professional trajectory in the US academic world. It bears witness to her eclectic curiosity, her commitment to the social sciences, her moral engagement in her time.-
--Didier Fassin, European Journal of Sociology
-RenEe Fox's life, like that of any pioneer in a tough field, glimmers before us as both an unreachable standard and a useful model. The word 'inspire' has been flattened into meaninglessness, but I'll use it anyway: Fox will inspire sociologists, anthropologists, and bioethicists to do their best work and be their best selves.-
--Anne Fadiman, Francis Writerin-Residence, Yale University; author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
-If only every autobiographer were an ethnographer as talented as RenEe Fox! In the Field is at once the enthralling life story of one of the leading sociologists of the past century and an intellectual and cultural history that provides profound perceptions regarding the many disciplines and varied cultures in which Professor Fox has been a participant-observer. Through her eyes, the reader travels on an extraordinary journey that encompasses patient wards and research labs in the US and Europe, the Upper West Side of New Yorkin the 1930s and the heart of Central Africa in the 1960s, the complex, dualistic and sometimes quarrelsome world of Belgium and the exciting, multidisciplinary, and sometimes quarrelsome world of bioethics. Like all books by RenEe Fox, this autobiography is a literary gem, alight with vivid characters, moving recollections, treasured friendships, and humanistic reflections.-
--Alexander M. Capron, Gould School of Law, University of Southern California
-A lifetime of participant observation on several continents has given RenEe Fox a wealth of fascinating stories, illuminated by reflection and gentle humor, while her development as a questing sociologist offers a model of the way that ethnographic methodology, meticulously respectful of human diversity and of the values of both individuals and communities, can unfold in profound ethical commitment.-
--Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom
-A brilliant social scientist and vivid storyteller, RenEe Fox describes an intellectual, epistolary, and peripatetic life lived to its fullest. Her life is filled with long relationships with salient figures of the twentieth century, close escapes with fatal illnesses, fascinating experiences on four continents, descriptions of academia at places and times where women were scarcely to be found, key roles in founding intellectual fields of inquiry, and even brushes with violent crime. The woman who began her career as the -young lady who misses nothing,- brings her astonishing powers of observation to her own life.... An illuminating and entertaining read.-
-She's not just a pioneering figure; she's a towering figure. Several of her books are landmark books, and she has trained generations of social scientists and dozens of senior academics now at departments of sociology and medical schools around the country.-
--Nicholas A. Christakis, M.D., Harvard Medical School, Harvard University
-This book is a fascinating and heartening life adventure story among compelling elements of medical research, medical education, and medical ethics... No book that I have read in many years provides such an excellent guide on these fundamental issues that affect us all. Yet the charm of this beautifully written book which is such a joy to read is how exciting and fascinating Dr. Fox's life story is and how she braids it together so effortlessly with these fundamental issues. While one finishes the book easily and with great pleasure, the deeper and illuminating messages resonate far beyond to our continuing benefit. Every citizen must read this book.-
--Kenneth E. MacWilliams, Portland, Maine, Amazon Review
