Audrey Richards

Audrey Isabel Richards, CBE, FRAI, FBA (8 July 1899 – 29 June 1984), was a pioneering British social anthropologist. She produced notable ethnographic studies, the most famous of which is Chisungu: A Girl's initiation ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia.

Her work also covered diverse topics such as nutrition, family structure, migration, and ethnicity. She conducted her field work in Zambia, Uganda and Essex.

Early life and education Audrey was the second of four girls born to a well-connected family in London, England. Her father, Sir Henry Erle Richards, was posted in Calcutta, India, where she spent her early childhood. Later, from 1911 to 1922, he was Chichele Professor of Public International Law at Oxford. Richards was educated at Downe House School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read natural sciences. She served as a relief worker in Germany for two years before returning to England and beginning graduate work.

She attended the London School of Economics where she was supervised by Bronisław Malinowski. She received her doctorate in 1931 for her thesis which was published in revised form as Hunger and work in a savage tribe: a functional study of nutrition among the Southern Bantu.

However, she returned to Britain in 1940 in order to assist with the war effort and held various positions in the Colonial Office, participating in the formation of the Colonial Social Science Research Council (1944).

After the war, she held a position as Reader in Anthropology University of London from 1946 to 1950. From 1956 to 1967, she was also director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Cambridge.

Research She attended the London School of Economics where she was supervised by Bronislaw Malinowski. Richards went to Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) in 1930

She conducted fieldwork in 1930–31, 1933–34, and 1957, where she worked primarily among the Bemba. In her economic study of the Bemba tribe Land Labour, and diet in Northern Rhodesia (1939), she would revise her earlier analysis on food and institutions to reflect that her expanded fieldwork had given her "concrete material to show how the biological facts of appetite and diet are themselves shaped by ... system(s) of human relationships and traditional activities".

Richards witnessed the Chisungu ritual during her first field work in 1931. It is a twenty-three day ceremony that involves songs, pottery and other symbolic elements. The express purpose of the Chisingu is the assumption of a new role: from young girl to womanhood. It can be classified as a "nubility ritual". Some rites concern removing the fear of blood, sex and fire from young girls. These rites have an element of trial, only those who are truly matured are able to pass them.

Honors Richards received the C.B.E. in 1955 and became a fellow of the British Academy in 1967. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.

Death In later life, she lived in Highsett, Cambridge. She died in 1984 near Midhurst, West Sussex, England.