Peter G. Rivière (born 1934) is a British social anthropologist, Emeritus Professor of Oxford University and, with Audrey Butt Colson, a pioneer in the study and teaching of Amazonian peoples in England.

"[8] In 2001, a group of his former students, today well established scholars in several major universities, edited a book celebrating his contributions to the field, where they underscored that: "[His] commitment to and interest in the particularities of Amazonian social processes, is not an abstract interest in the 'particular', understood as a theoretical commitment in the manner of the Boasians.

Lowland South American groups are not bearers of distinctive traits to be inventoried and classified, but organized totalities responding to specific social rules, laws, and constraints.

Interest in the particular, therefore, results from an appreciation of the necessity of accurate scholarship, no less than brave new worlds of theory, as Rivière's work on the dialectical relationship between cosmological schemas and forms of social organization demonstrates.

He also published a book on the frontier dispute between Great Britain and Brazil,[9] and edited two volumes of Robert Schomburgk’s Guiana travels in 1835-44 for the Hakluyt Society.