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.
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