Audrey Richards facts for kids

Audrey Isabel Richards (born July 8, 1899 – died June 29, 1984) was a very important British social anthropologist. She studied how people live in different societies. Her most famous work is about a special ceremony called Chisungu among the Bemba people in Zambia.

Audrey Richards also studied many other things. These included how people get their food (nutrition), how families are set up, how people move from one place to another (migration), and different cultural groups (ethnicity). She did her research in Zambia, Uganda, and even in Essex, England.

Early Life and Education

Audrey was born in London, England. She was one of four sisters. Her father, Sir Henry Erle Richards, was a professor at Oxford. Audrey spent some of her early childhood in Calcutta, India, where her father worked.

She went to Downe House School and then to Newnham College, Cambridge. There, she studied natural sciences. After college, she worked for two years helping people in Germany.

Later, she studied at the London School of Economics. She earned her doctorate degree in 1931. Her research was published as a book called Hunger and work in a savage tribe. This book looked at how food and work affected people in Southern Africa.

Academic Career

Even though Audrey Richards was very good at her job, she never became a full professor in anthropology. She taught at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1933, and again from 1935 to 1937. In 1938, she became a senior lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

In 1940, she returned to Britain to help with the war effort. She worked for the Colonial Office and helped create the Colonial Social Science Research Council in 1944.

After the war, she taught anthropology at the University of London from 1946 to 1950.

In 1950, she became the first director of the East African Institute of Social Research. This institute was located at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda. She retired from this role in 1956.

Audrey Richards then went back to her old college, Newnham College, Cambridge. She became a fellow there. From 1956 to 1967, she also directed the African Studies Centre at the University of Cambridge.

She was the second President of the African Studies Association of the UK. She was also the President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1964 to 1965. She was the first woman to hold this important position.

Research Work

Audrey Richards went to Zambia (which was then called Northern Rhodesia) in 1930. She was researching for her book Hunger and work in a savage tribe. In this book, she wanted to show how the need for food shapes how societies work in some parts of Southern Africa.

She did more fieldwork in Zambia in 1930–31, 1933–34, and 1957. She mainly worked with the Bemba tribe. In her book Land Labour, and diet in Northern Rhodesia (1939), she changed some of her earlier ideas. She realized that how people get food is also shaped by their relationships and traditions.

In her first books about the Bemba people, she showed how new things like money and taxes from colonial rule changed African societies. She explored how these changes affected people's daily lives. She called this a "new field of anthropological research."

Audrey Richards' careful studies of daily life set a new standard for fieldwork. She focused on real-world problems and worked with experts from different fields. She is seen as a founder of nutritional anthropology, which studies how food and culture are connected.

She also published "East African Chiefs" (1959). This book compared how different African leaders were affected by "Indirect Rule," a way the British governed their colonies.

Later, Richards worked in the Transvaal region of South Africa in 1939-40. She also worked in Uganda between 1950 and 1955.

She even studied a village in England called Elmdon, Essex, where she lived for many years.

Chisungu: A Girl's Initiation Ceremony

This book is probably Audrey Richards' most famous work. In it, she describes a special ceremony for girls among the Bemba people in Zambia. She explains that Bemba society has three main types of important ceremonies:

• Ceremonies for kings
• Ceremonies for farming and food
• Chisungu ceremonies

The Chisungu ceremonies are for girls becoming women in the Bemba society. Richards gives a detailed description and explanation of these rituals.

These three types of ceremonies are all connected in Bemba beliefs. They are thought to influence the fertility of the land and the people.

Richards saw the Chisungu ritual during her first fieldwork in 1931. It is a 23-day ceremony that includes songs, pottery, and other symbolic actions. The main goal of Chisungu is for a young girl to take on a new role: from girlhood to womanhood. It is a "nubility ritual," meaning it marks the transition to being ready for marriage and having children. Some parts of the ceremony help girls overcome fears. These parts are like tests, and only those who are truly ready can pass them.

Many anthropologists thought these ceremonies were like formal schools for children. But Richards found that no formal teaching actually happened. Instead, the girls learned secret words known only to those who had been initiated. They also learned the right attitudes for their new duties as wives and mothers.

Richards believed that the Chisungu ceremony was more about the social structure and values of the tribe. She thought that rituals help keep a society's cultural values strong. She also said that rituals can have many meanings and purposes. For example, a ritual might also be a chance for different groups to compete. She stressed that the meaning of a ritual can change depending on who is performing it and why.

Honours

Audrey Richards received the C.B.E. award in 1955. She became a fellow of the British Academy in 1967. In 1974, she was chosen as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Death

In her later years, she lived in Cambridge, England. She passed away in 1984 near Midhurst, West Sussex, England.

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 I. (1950) Some types of family structure amongst the Central Bantu
• Richards, Audrey. (1956) Chisungu: a girl's initiation ceremony among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia. London: Faber.
• Richards, Audrey I. (1966) Changing structure of a Ganda village: Kisozi, 1892–1952, East Africon Studies No. 24 Nairobi: East African Publishing House
• 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.
• Richards, Audrey I. (1969) The Multicultural States of East Africa. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.