Alan Fiske

Alan Page Fiske, born in 1947, is an American professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose work sits where psychology and anthropology meet. He is known for studying the nature of human relationships and how they vary from one culture to another. After a bachelor's degree at Harvard in 1968 and graduate degrees at the University of Chicago, he worked with the Peace Corps in Bangladesh and Upper Volta before holding posts at several American colleges and, from 2002, a full professorship at UCLA, where he directed centres on behavior, evolution and culture and on culture, brain and development. He is the author of Relational Models Theory, which describes a small number of elementary forms of human relationship, and with Tage Rai of Virtuous Violence Theory, which holds that much violence is motivated by moral feelings about relationships and is experienced by perpetrators as justified.