Audrey Richards

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Audrey Isabel Richards (8 July 1899, London, England-29 June 1984, near Midhurst, West Sussex, England), was a pioneering British woman social anthropologist who worked mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. Audrey was the second of four girls born to a well-connected family. Her father was posted in Calcultta, India, where she spent her early childhood, and later was professor of law at Oxford. Richards was educated at Downe House School, and read biology at Newnham College, Cambridge. She served as a relief worker in Germany for two years before returning to England and beginning graduate work. She received her PhD in 1931 from the London School of Economics under Malinowski.

She conducted fieldwork in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), in 1930-31, 1933-34, and 1957. where she worked primarily among the Bemba. Later, Richards worked in the Transvaal region of South Africa in 1939-40 and in Uganda intermittently between 1950 and 1955. She later carried out an ethnographic study of the village of Elmdon, Essex, England, where she lived for many years.

Audrey Richards' careful studies of daily life set a new standard for field research and opened a door for nutritional anthropology by concentrating on practical problems and working interdisciplinarily. Richards is probably best known for her work Chisungu (1956), a study of girls' initiation rites. She is also regarded as a founder of the field of nutritional anthropology.

Though she was widely regarded for her academic accomplishements, Richards never held a tenured chair in anthropology. She held lectureships at the London School of Economics, the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, and the University of London. She also held various positions in the Colonial Office, participating in the formation of the Colonial Social Science Research Council. In 1950 she became the first director of the East African Institute of Social Research. In 1956 she returned to her alma mater at Newnham College as lecturer and director of the African Studies Centre at Cambridge. She served as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute and of the African Studies Association of the UK. Richards received the C.B.E. in 1955 and became a fellow of the British Academy in 1967.

[edit] References

Raymond Firth, (1985) "Audrey Richards 1899-1984." Man, New Series, 20(2): 341-344.
J. S. La Fontaine, (1985) "Audrey Isabel Richards 1899-1984" Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 201-206.
Jo Gladstone, (1986) "Significant Sister: autonomy and obligation in Audrey Richards' early fieldwork" American Ethnologist, 13(2):338-362.

[edit] Select Publications

Richards, Audrey. (1932) Hunger and work in a savage tribe: a functional study of nutrition among the Southern Bantu. London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul.

Richards, Audrey. (1939) Land, Labour, and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: and economic study of the Bemba tribe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Richards, Audrey. (1956) Chisungu: a girl's initiation ceremony among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia. London: Faber.
Strathern, Marilyn and Audrey Richards. (1981) Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, a Village in North-west Essex in the Nineteen-Sixties. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.