Audrey Richards

Audrey Isabel Richards was a British social anthropologist, born in London in 1899, who studied under Bronislaw Malinowski and conducted pioneering fieldwork in Zambia and Uganda. Her best known monograph, Chisungu: A Girl's Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia, examined female initiation ritual, and her broader research addressed nutrition, family structure, migration and ethnicity; she is recognized as a founder of nutritional anthropology. She held positions including lecturer at the London School of Economics, senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, first director of the East African Institute of Social Research, and Smuts Reader in Anthropology at Cambridge, where she was also a fellow of Newnham College. She died near Midhurst, West Sussex, in 1984.