Audrey Richards – författare

Audrey Richards (1899-1984) was a leading British anthropologist of the twentieth century and the first woman president of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Based on fieldwork conducted at a time when the discipline was dominated by male anthropologists, Chisungu: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony Among the Bemba of Zambia is widely hailed as a classic of anthropology and African and gender studies.Underpinned by painstaking research carried out by Richards among the Bemba people in northern Zambia in the 1930s, Chisungu focuses on the initiation ceremonies for young Bemba girls. Pioneering the study of women’s rituals and challenging the prevailing theory that rites of passage served merely to transfer individuals from one status to another, Richards writes about the incredibly rich and diverse aspects of ritual that characterised Chisungu: its concern with matriliny; deference to elders; sex and reproduction; the birth of children; ideas about the continuity between past, present and future; and the centrality of emotional conflict.On a deeper level, Chisungu is a crucial work for the role it accords to the meaning of symbolism in explaining the structure of society, paving the way for much subsequent understanding of the role of symbolic meaning and kinship.This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Jessica Johnson and an introduction by Jean La Fontaine.

Audrey Richards (1899-1984) was a leading British anthropologist of the twentieth century and the first woman president of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Based on fieldwork conducted at a time when the discipline was dominated by male anthropologists, Chisungu: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony Among the Bemba of Zambia is widely hailed as a classic of anthropology and African and gender studies.Underpinned by painstaking research carried out by Richards among the Bemba people in northern Zambia in the 1930s, Chisungu focuses on the initiation ceremonies for young Bemba girls. Pioneering the study of women’s rituals and challenging the prevailing theory that rites of passage served merely to transfer individuals from one status to another, Richards writes about the incredibly rich and diverse aspects of ritual that characterised Chisungu: its concern with matriliny; deference to elders; sex and reproduction; the birth of children; ideas about the continuity between past, present and future; and the centrality of emotional conflict.On a deeper level, Chisungu is a crucial work for the role it accords to the meaning of symbolism in explaining the structure of society, paving the way for much subsequent understanding of the role of symbolic meaning and kinship.This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Jessica Johnson and an introduction by Jean La Fontaine.

Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe examines the cultural aspects of food and eating among the Southern Bantu, taking as its starting point the bold statement 'nutrition as a biological process is more fundamental than sex'. When it was first published in 1932, with a preface by Malinowski, it laid the groundwork for sociological theory of nutrition. Richards was also among the first anthropologists to establish women's lives and the social sphere as legitimate subjects for anthropological study.

A collection of seven papers by social anthropologists on the processes of decision-making in councils. Types of council described are one community-in-council, two arena councils, an elite council, two modern local government councils and a non-council, a temporary negotiating group which nevertheless displays certain features of the council proper. Most of the examples come from Africa (including Madagascar), but there is also an account of politics and decision-making in an English town council. The editors discuss the papers in a comparative framework, considering also other accounts of conciliar structure and decision-making. They review the ways in which decisions are reached and implemented in societies with very different structures and activities and discuss the impact of written records, colonial overrule and political independence. They attempt to outline some general principles of conciliar structure and process.