Knowra Audrey Richards Audrey Richards Audrey Isabel Richards (1899–1984) was a British social anthropologist whose fieldwork in Zambia and Uganda examined nutrition, kinship, labor, and social life.
Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia : A 1939 study by Audrey Richards of how labor migration and economic change affected food and nutrition among the Bemba. This monograph develops her account of nutrition through Bemba food practices and labor migration.
Participant observation : A research method in which investigators take part in and observe the everyday activities of a community. Richards’s fieldwork relied on sustained observation of ordinary practices, not only formal accounts.
London School of Economics : A public research university in London, founded in 1895, with a longstanding social-science tradition. Richards studied and later taught there, working within British social anthropology.
Lucy Mair : A British social anthropologist known for research on African political systems and colonial administration. Mair and Richards were prominent contemporaries in British Africanist anthropology.
Economic anthropology : The study of how economic activities are organized and understood within social and cultural life. Richards’s studies showed that production and consumption could not be separated from kinship and custom.
Chisungu : A Bemba girls’ initiation ceremony marking a transition toward adult status and marriageability. Richards documented its songs and symbolism in a detailed study of Bemba social life.
Ethnography : The systematic description and analysis of a people, community, or social world based on field research. Her books turned long-term field observations into detailed accounts of social life.
Bronisław Malinowski : A Polish-British anthropologist associated with participant observation and functionalist social theory. His teaching at the LSE shaped the anthropological environment in which Richards trained.
Meyer Fortes : A British social anthropologist known for studies of kinship and political organization among West African peoples. His structural analyses offer a close disciplinary comparison with Richards’s African ethnography.
Colonial anthropology : Anthropological research conducted within, and often shaped by, the political conditions of colonial rule. Her African fieldwork took place under British colonialism, a context that shaped research institutions and interpretation.
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