Paul Richards (anthropology)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (February 2008)

Paul Richards is Professor of Technology and Agrarian Development, Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He was formerly a Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University College London for many years, and previously taught anthropology and geography, at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Richards is an anthropological commentator and researcher on agricultural technology and African farming systems. He has worked in Sierra Leone for over thirty years, conducting ethnographic studies of Mende village rice farming systems and forest conservation on the Liberian border. After the region became affected by the Sierra Leonian civil war (1992-2002), he turned to analysis of that conflict and has written more widely on the anthropology of armed conflicts.

Richards argues, following Durkheim, that human technique and skill underpins human action and institutional change. He began by examining everyday livelihood activities like farming. He coined the term "agriculture as performance" based on years of observing the reflexivity of African farmers and their responses to stress and risks, and drawing on his own skills and interest in musical performance. His populist faith in African farmers to survive and prosper, despite the magnitude of the risks that faced, was set out in Indigenous Agricultural Revolution (1985), a book that generated fierce debate, since it accused agronomic research and international development organisations of missing the "moving target" of peasant farming and failing to see how innovations took place outside the realm of formal science and laboratories. The book's ideas were diametrically opposed to those of more pessimistic observers that lacked detailed field knowledge, that had often accused the same farmers of environmental degradation. Richards has proposed the term "technography" to describe the set of detailed research skills needed by anthropologists, and others, to understand how technology is deployed and used. Technograpies have been conducted by teams including several Wageningen research students and collaborators.

"Fighting for the rainforest" (1996) showed how the involvement of youth in Sierra Leonean rebel movements had little to do with widely-perceived "Barbarism" of rebel groups in resource-rich regions. War is, also, part of a "performance" with its origins in history, social orders, and human agency. The widely held "New Barbarism" theories of Robert Kaplan and others had suggested abundant natural resources, like Sierra Leone's diamonds, were a magnet for human greed and civil conflict. Instead, Richards has argued the involvement of youth in the RUF rebel movement was a form of social resistance to patrimonial rule in Sierra Leone, did not appear to have a strong underlying motive of greed (for the diamond revenues), and was a considered response rather than a spontaneous, 'barbaric' movement. Grievances were partly responsible for the violence that undoubtedly did afflict Sierra Leone during its civil war and for which the RUF were partly responsible. Richards has advised aid and humanitarian agencies on African post-war reconstruction, demobilization and skills-training.

[edit] Published works

Richards, P. 1985. Indigenous agricultural revolution. Methuen.
Richards, P. 1986. Coping with hunger. UCL Press.
Richards, P. 1996. Fighting for the Rain Forest. War, Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: James Currey.
Richards, P. (ed.) 2005. No peace, no war: an anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts. Oxford: James Currey.
Richards, P. 2007. The emotions at war: a musicological approach to understanding atrocity in Sierra Leone. In Perri 6, S. Radstone, C. Squire & A. Treacher, (eds.), Public emotions. Basingstoke: Palgrave.