Professor Alan P. Fiske is a leading Psychological Anthropologist whose work and research are dedicated to the study of human relationships and how they are influenced by natural selection, neurobiology, ontogeny, psychology and cross-cultural variations. He is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Professor Fiske, whose first book was Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations, is interested in how social relations are coordinated by complex systems governed by culture and history. In particular, he explores how social relationships are connected in morally significant ways where each relationship is dependent on the others.

As a theorist, Professor Fiske formulated the Relational Models Theory (RMT), an integrated theory of human sociality developed after fieldwork in Burkina Faso. RMT has had an immense influence on anthropology and other disciplines, having been deployed in nearly 300 published works by experts across the academic spectrum. He also co-authored the virtuous violence theory.

His latest book is Kama Muta: Discovering the Connecting Emotion, an in-depth and revelatory exploration of the powerful and overwhelming feeling that is kama muta (‘moved by love’ in Sanskrit).