Anthropology and history: Audrey Richards and the representation of gender relations in northern Rhodesia
| dc.contributor.author | Vaughan, Megan | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2011-05-26T06:40:05Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2011-05-26T06:40:05Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 1992-03-23 | |
| dc.description | African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 23 March 1992 | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | In June 1930, Audrey Richards, a young British anthropologist who had trained with Malinowski, arrived in her research area - the Bemba plateau in the northeastern corner of what was then Northern Rhodesia. She was to stay until July 1931, returning for a second piece of field work between January 1933 and July 1934. As a result of this research Richards published, in 1939,a book entitled Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: an Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe [LLD]. [In the first part of this paper I will describe what I feel to have been the major contribution of this work. Then I will go on to talk about the context in which it was produced, and finally to say something about the difficulties of following it up]. The concerns of LLD are familiar ones to the Africanist anthropologist and historian sixty years later. In LLD Richards documented the material circumstances of the lives of a rural African people. She described in detail their agricultural system, paying particular attention to the gender division of labour within this. She described the way in which her Bemba informants used the land, and what meanings they attached to the land and its uses. She described what is now fashionably called 'indigenous knowledge1, and particularly local ecological management. She paid close attention to the seasonally of agricultural production, her discussion of which provided the link bewteen her analysis of production and that of consumption, for LLD is not only about how and what an African agricultural people produced, but is also about how the product was distributed and consumed. LLD is one of the very first studies of what Richards called the 'primitive diet', and there were two aspects to Richards' approach to this issue. On the one hand (and following logically from her earlier work on hunger which I will discuss in more detail later), she was concerned with the social meaning of food, with the emotions which food engendered in a people who were familiar with hunger. She was, in particular, concerned to test out the hypothesis that some 'primitive peoples' might hold beliefs about food, and especially food taboos, which were directly detrimental to their nutritional status. The other aspect of her study of diet, however, was quantitative and positivistic in orientation. This was a direct and pioneering study of consumption, involving not only daily records of what she observed different groups and individuals eating, but also, on a smaller scale, the weighing of food consumed and a calculation of its nutritional value. Since the Bemba diet included centrally, at certain times of year,a significant proportion of wild and gathered foods (including caterpillars and mushrooms), this calculation of nutritional values was no mean task. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10539/9934 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | African Studies Institute;ISS 447 | |
| dc.subject | Richards, Audrey I. | en_US |
| dc.title | Anthropology and history: Audrey Richards and the representation of gender relations in northern Rhodesia | en_US |
| dc.type | Working Paper | en_US |