Audrey Isabel Richards, CBE, FRAI, FBA (8 July 1899 – 29 June 1984),[3] was a pioneering British social anthropologist.

Richards was educated at Downe House School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read natural sciences.

[9] 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.

Richards went to Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) in 1930[1] for her research for Hunger and work in a savage tribe: a functional study of nutrition among the Southern Bantu (1932).

In this functional study she sets out to show how "the fundamental urge for food shapes human institutions" in some southern African societies.

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".

[4] In her own words, this would be a "new field of anthropological research -- African society as it is changing in contact with the forces of western civilization".

[13] Audrey Richards' careful studies of daily life set a new standard for field research and opened a door for nutritional anthropology by concentrating on practical problems and working with an interdisciplinary focus.

She published Land, Labour and diet in Northern Rhodesia (1939) this was produced partly to support the nutritional interests of the International African Institute.

Instead, the girls learned secret terms known only to the initiated as well as socially approved attitudes toward their new duties as wives and mothers.

[15] In place of the common interpretation of rites as education, Richards hypothesizes that the Chisingu is linked more with the social structure and values of the tribe.