P Richards
Biographic Data
| ID | 20419 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Richards |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Richards |
| SIGNATURE | RICHARDS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wageningen University & Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5813-0228 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 117 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 688 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 117 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Comparing social responses to Ebola and Covid-19 in Sierra Leone
This paper compares community responses to Ebola and Covid-19 in two regions of southern and eastern Sierra Leone with reference to the theory of institutional dynamics proposed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas. Institutions, Douglas argued, are conveyed by styles of thought, shaped by the ways human communities, through everyday practices, reinforce systems of classification and denotation. Pandemic advice to ‘follow the science’ proved proble…
Movilidad humana y situación de calle
La articulación de diferentes tipos de metodologías en la investigación de derechos humanos permite obtener perspectivas más amplias y enriquecidas de los problemas a los cuales se quiere enfrentar, para, de esta forma, establecer estrategias de intervención confiables, integrales y con impacto permanente. Es con base en ello que este trabajo presenta una propuesta metodológica caracterizada por la combinación de diferentes tipos de conocimiento,…
Anthropology & the Nobel Prize for Economics 2024
Did aid to the Ebola crisis divert aid for reproductive, maternal, and newborn health? An analysis of donor-reported data in Sierra Leone
Modest changes to RMNH donor aid patterns are insufficient to explain the severe decline in RMNH indicators recorded during the outbreak. Our findings therefore suggest the need for substantial increases in routine aid to ensure that basic RMNH services and infrastructure are strong before an epidemic occurs, as well as increased aid for RMNH during epidemics like Ebola and Covid-19, if reproductive, maternal and newborn healthcare is to be maint…
People's science
In 1982 IITA sponsored a workshop on the subject of on-farm experimentation. The chief advantage of experimenting on farms is that, by putting researchers in touch with the farmers’ views and conditions, it considerably broadens the researchers’ understanding of the technical as well as social aspects of farming systems. On-farm experimentation guarantees that new ideas and techniques being channeled into rural communities are truly relevant and …
The ecology of West African farming systems
This chapter summarizes some of the ecological principles on which small-holder agriculture in West Africa rests. Rural knowledge of ecological processes is an area of skill formation which tends to be treated solely as a ‘hang-over’ from the past. Nearly the whole of West Africa lies in the tropical zone of seasonal rainfall. In southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East the bulk of rainfall comes in winter, and crops ripen during a dry s…
The ecology of West African farming systems
Two areas of agricultural ecology where West African smallholders have displayed special enterprise and inventiveness are intercropping and the effective use of wet-land environments. Intercropping is rare or unknown in temperate zone agriculture. In West Africa, by contrast, 80 per cent of all farm land is intercropped. Intercropping – the planting of different crops in the same field during the same season – is used synonymously with the term ‘…
Science and the peasantry
Until about 1965 agricultural research in West Africa, as in many other parts of the tropics, was heavily biased towards ‘export’ crops. The Green Revolution is a phrase coined in the 1960s to describe the increased output obtainable from improved wheat and rice varieties developed by plant breeding research programmes in Mexico and the Philippines. High-yielding varieties developed by CG-System programmes are now quite widespread in West Africa.…
Food crops and environment
This chapter attempts to answer the questions, what kinds of agricultural development and resource management policies have already been tried in West Africa, and what lessons relevant to current difficulties might be learnt from a consideration of earlier policy initiatives. Botanical gardens were the focus of initial efforts by colonial administrations to make an input into agriculture. A thousand miles to the west, in Sierra Leone, colonial ag…
Conclusion
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides the formal R&D sector with data for a debate about longer-term research strategies and priorities, and provides ‘in-service’ training for extension staff. West Africa is a region in which low rural population densities are still quite common and where landscape and ecosystem diversity is especially great. Local agricult…
The ecological dynamics of West African food-crop farming systems
Planners and policy makers frequently underestimate capacity for change in the peasant farming sector, because it is difficult for them to spot and assess significant developments when these are spread over a large number of small-scale production units. This chapter looks at two West African food-production systems, one in Sierra Leone, the other in Nigeria. The lowlands stretching back from the Sierra Leone coast are terminated by a pronounced …
The moral economy of isolates
Edward Banfield was one of the first scholars clearly to describe the condition of peasant isolate social ordering, problematically terming it 'amoral familism'. James Scott offered a more positive framing by referring to the potential of 'escape agriculture' to sustain political autonomy. The present paper returns to these debates about peasant moral economy. Norms concerning production and distribution are not exogenous givens but products of c…
Negotiating Intersecting Precarities
This article shares findings on COVID-19 in Africa across 2020 to examine concepts and practices of epidemic preparedness and response. Amidst uncertainties about the trajectory of COVID-19, the stages of emergency response emerge in practice as interconnected. We illustrate how complex dynamics manifest as diverse actors interpret and modify approaches according to contexts and experiences. We suggest that the concept of "intersecting precaritie…
Vaccine anxieties, vaccine preparedness
Global debates about vaccines as a key element of pandemic response and future preparedness in the era of Covid-19 currently focus on questions of supply, with attention to global injustice in vaccine distribution and African countries as rightful beneficiaries of international de-regulation and financing initiatives such as COVAX. At the same time, vaccine demand and uptake are seen to be threatened by hesitancy, often attributed to an increasin…
Keeping Ebola at bay
Ebola Virus Disease struck Sierra Leone in May 2014. An international response was instrumental in ending the epidemic by December 2015 and has been extensively documented. Less attention has been paid to local responses. Here, we focus on a case in which there was no infection despite high infection in neighbouring areas. This brings into focus the role of customary public authority in implementing successful controls. We pay particular attentio…
Agrarian Creolization
West of the Bandama river in the Ivory Coast, however, among groups speaking the Mande languages of the Upper Niger basin or the West Atlantic languages of the Upper Guinea coast, material cultures and moral economy have long been shaped by the experience of cultivation of rice in forested environments. The possibility of making such comparisons would seem to be especially intriguing in view of the fact that the origins of West African rice agric…
Measuring the economic abatement cost of sea turtle bycatch in the Northwest Atlantic commercial pelagic longline fishery
Rural–urban connectivity strengthens agrarian peace
Rural‐based insurgencies disrupted the forest margins of Upper West Africa in the 1990s. A subsequent return to peace was accompanied by strong growth in small‐scale trade in foodstuffs and other agrarian produce in high demand in towns. Motor cycle taxis are a feature of this increased rural–urban market integration. It was a mode of transport pioneered by ex‐combatants. Where rural women were once attacked by rural young men without job prospec…
(Re)arranging “systems of care” in the early Ebola response in Sierra Leone
Despite an expanding literature on Ebola-response, few studies detail or reflect on the responses of diverse systems of care. Little is known about how, why or in what ways, strategies of ill-health management were enacted locally, how health-systems power, authority and hierarchy were perceived and contested, or how other social systems, institutions and relationships shaped the response. This paper presents an interdisciplinary analysis of loca…
Public authority and its demons
Demonization is a widespread aspect of political discourse. We are familiar with the demonization of Brussels bureaucrats as a tool for pursuing the British exit from the European Union, and we take stories about the compulsory straightening of bananas with a pinch of salt, however frustrating it might be that some disaffected voters choose to accept these canards as true. But somehow, stories about the demonic in Africa have been accorded much g…
How Should Public Health Officials Respond When Important Local Rituals Increase Risk of Contagion
During the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, people were required by law to call a trained "safe burial" team to dispose of the body of a person who had died from Ebola. It took days for a team to arrive, however, due to limited resources and rural travel obstacles, so some villagers felt obliged to bury their loved ones themselves. Even with timely arrival of a team, there can be cultural priorities that deserve attention. One man's case…
Ebola and Covid-19 in Sierra Leone
This case study focuses on two epidemic diseases in Sierra Leone. Ebola in 2014-15 drew international response, but was contained within the Upper West African region. Covid-19 reached Sierra Leone in April 2020 as part of a global pandemic. Comparing the two cases allows closer examination of historical context as a factor shaping medical emergencies. Ebola response references Sierra Leone's history as a humanitarian project associated with the …
Bill of Sale Lending
The Bills of Sale Acts were enacted in Victorian times as a form of secured credit whereby ‘goods’ owned by a borrower could be assigned under the bill of sale to a lender who would have title to the goods transferred to him. The lender would then allow the borrower to retain possession of the goods in exchange for instalment payments with interest. In the twenty‐first century these bills are most commonly used as ‘logbook loans’ for vehicles wit…
Playing development roles
Performance is a useful lens through which to analyze agrarian life, as performance illuminates the ways that farmers manage the complex socioecological demands of farm work while participating in social life and in the larger political economy. The dialectic of planning and improvisation in the farm field has produced scholarship at multiple scales of political ecology, including the global ramifications of new technologies or policies, as well …
Peasant farming as improvisation
Improvisation is currently enjoying an intellectual vogue across fields as diverse as the musicology of free jazz to management science. But what are the theoretical moorings of this far-reaching new enterprise? First, the article offers a brief review of some potential foundations for studies of improvisation. The hypothesis that humans possess neurons for mirrored interaction because they have evolved as social animals is arguably as plausible …
Why we fight
Young people are the major participants in most wars. In the African civil wars of the last twenty years combatants have become increasingly youthful. Some forces are made up largely of young teenagers; combatants may sometimes be as young as 8 or 10, and girl fighters are increasingly common. The trend to more youthful combatants also reflects the discovery that children-their social support disrupted by war-make brave and loyal fighters; the co…
West African Insurgencies in Agrarian Perspective
This paper examines agrarian issues in civil wars in Côte d'Ivoire and Sierra Leone. Attention is paid to two different ways in which lineage society evolved during the colonial and post-colonial periods. The motivations of fighters are related to these different trajectories of agrarian social change. In Côte d'Ivoire youth militia fought to uphold a lineage-based social order, but in Sierra Leone a comparable group of young fighters sought to o…
Indigenous Agricultural Revolution
Converts to Human Rights? Popular Debate About War and justice in Rural Central Sierra Leone
Internationally, war in Sierra Leone (1991-2002) is regarded as an instance of violent conflict driven by economic factors (attempts to control the mining of alluvial diamonds). Fieldwork (2000-01) in rural areas recovering from war suggests a very different picture. War victims and combatants from different factions stress the importance of political decay, corruption, injustice and the social exclusion of young people. Other studies confirm the…
To fight or to farm? Agrarian dimensions of the Mano River conflicts (Liberia and Sierra Leone)
The wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone have been linked to the condition of urbanized youth. Recent research in southeastern Sierra Leone and northwestern Liberia suggests the rural context is of greater significance. The fighting was mainly in rural areas, involved mainly rural youth, and adapted itself to their local concerns. A model of war as the work of urban criminal gangs, reflecting local student politics in the 1970s and embraced internati…
Violence and War in Agrarian Perspective
The bulk of analysis and commentary on violent conflicts in developing countries over the past 20 years or so has neglected the dynamics and tensions of agrarian political economy. Introducing a special issue devoted to these agrarian dimensions of armed conflict, non-war violence and post-war repertoires of political mobilization, this paper argues for a new research and policy agenda. In doing so, we revive some older analytical approaches and …
The Multiplication of Labor
Ecological Change and the Politics of African Land Use
The invention of biodiversity
Biodiversity means, in its broadest sense, the variety of life. More specifically it can refer to the number of species, genetic diversity or the variety of environments in which species or genes are to be found. The concept is in some ways an odd one, since biodiversity is quantitative without necessarily being quantifiable. As an object of study biodiversity is a bit like an iceberg-most of it is hidden from view, and (like the underwater porti…
Kant's Geography and Mental Maps
Immanuel Kant was an enthusiastic geographer. His geographical thought was quite unmistakeably influenced by his philosophical system as a whole. This influence is particularly strong in the case of his ideas on geographical space. Kant argues that geographical space serves as a mental framework for the co-ordination of the individual's experiences of the world. In this respect he anticipates the notion of the cognitive or mental map, which geogr…
Vaccine anxieties, vaccine preparedness
Global debates about vaccines as a key element of pandemic response and future preparedness in the era of Covid-19 currently focus on questions of supply, with attention to global injustice in vaccine distribution and African countries as rightful beneficiaries of international de-regulation and financing initiatives such as COVAX. At the same time, vaccine demand and uptake are seen to be threatened by hesitancy, often attributed to an increasin…
Rebellion and Agrarian Tensions in Sierra Leone
This paper assesses the extent to which customary governance in Sierra Leone can be held responsible for an increasingly unstable two-class agrarian society. A case is made for regarding the civil war (1991-2002) as being an eruption of long-term, entrenched agrarian tensions exacerbated by chiefly rule. Evidence is presented to suggest that the main rebel movement embodied in its plans to reorganize agricultural production some grasp of these lo…
Upland and swamp rice farming systems in Sierra Leone
IntroductionIt is thought that African rice (Oryza glaberrima), domesticated from the annual wild rice Oryza barthii, a plant of savanna river valleys and water holes, may have been first cultivated along the valley of the upper and middle Niger (Portères, 1970; Harlan, 1975). Cultivation under high rainfall conditions in the forest zone followed the development of 'upland' cultivars. Today, farmers in the drier savannas continue to depend on the…
Peasant grievance and insurgency in Sierra Leone
Was the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002) fought for diamonds, or was it a peasant insurgency motivated by agrarian grievances? The evidence on both sides is less than conclusive. This article scrutinizes the peasant insurgency argument via a more rigorous methodology. Hypotheses concerning intra-peasant tensions over marriage and farm labour are derived from an examination of the anthropological literature. These are tested using econometric…
Black Poor and White Philanthropists
This book examines the events surrounding the establishment of a settlement in West Africa in 1787, which was later to become Freetown, the present-day capital of Sierra Leone. It outlines the range of ideas and attitudes to Africa which underlay the foundation of the settlement, and the part played by the settlers themselves, London's 'Black Poor'. The relevance of the expedition to contemporary race relations in Britain is considered. Once in W…
Seeds and Rights
Based on preliminary findings of ongoing 'action research' in the war zone in central Sierra Leone, this paper shows how more equitable seed distribution could contribute to fostering a culture of human rights as well as to agricultural rehabilitation. Assessment of seeds-and-tools programmes in 19 villages found that aid agency targeting and distribution modalities channelled inputs through village committees which denied assistance to intended …
Farming systems and agrarian change in West Africa
Rural people as conservationists
Contrary to neo-Malthusian assumptions population increase may not necessarily mean less biodiversity. More people may mean more care of the environment. Much depends on the circumstances through which local populations develop an awareness of, and practical involvement in, biodiversity management. This article considers two instances. In the first, an apparently pristine rain forest turns out on closer inspection to be heavy with the marks of pa…
Dressed to Kill
Technology is often defined in terms of tools or machines but, in this article, it is treated as the human capacity to make. The author focuses on clothing as an instance of making in war. Specific attention is paid to the junction between the power to make (or unmake) and the social and ritual capacities for regulation through which making is governed. In this sense, the study is intended as a contribution to a revived interest in the incomplete…
New political violence in Africa – Secular sectarianism in Sierra Leone
Negotiating Intersecting Precarities
This article shares findings on COVID-19 in Africa across 2020 to examine concepts and practices of epidemic preparedness and response. Amidst uncertainties about the trajectory of COVID-19, the stages of emergency response emerge in practice as interconnected. We illustrate how complex dynamics manifest as diverse actors interpret and modify approaches according to contexts and experiences. We suggest that the concept of "intersecting precaritie…
Playing development roles
Performance is a useful lens through which to analyze agrarian life, as performance illuminates the ways that farmers manage the complex socioecological demands of farm work while participating in social life and in the larger political economy. The dialectic of planning and improvisation in the farm field has produced scholarship at multiple scales of political ecology, including the global ramifications of new technologies or policies, as well …
A Systematic Approach to Cultural Explanations of War
Les guerres africaines du type fleuve Mano
Contre les tenants de l'analyse utilitariste et du choix rationnel, une analyse sociologique des guerres qui se sont produites dans la région du fleuve Mano (et ailleurs en Afrique) instruite par la théorie durkeimienne permet de mieux souligner des dimensions essentielles de ces conflits, portant notamment sur leur occurrence et sur les conditions de leur terme
Local Strategies for Coping With Hunger
Journal Article LOCAL STRATEGIES FOR COPING WITH HUNGER: CENTRAL SIERRA LEONE AND NORTHERN NIGERIA COMPARED Get access PAUL RICHARDS PAUL RICHARDS Reader in Anthropology University College, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 89, Issue 355, April 1990, Pages 265–276, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a098288 Published: 01 April 1990
Le Frene et sa Culture.
Kant's Geography and Mental Maps
Immanuel Kant was an enthusiastic geographer. His geographical thought was quite unmistakeably influenced by his philosophical system as a whole. This influence is particularly strong in the case of his ideas on geographical space. Kant argues that geographical space serves as a mental framework for the co-ordination of the individual's experiences of the world. In this respect he anticipates the notion of the cognitive or mental map, which geogr…
The history of black Africa
L'Education permanente et ses concepts périphériques. Recherches documentaires
African Environment
Georges Savonnet
Georges Savonnet: Les Birifor de Diépla et sa région, insulaires du rameau Lobi (Haute-Volta). (Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. Atlas des Structures Agraires au Sud du Sahara, 12.) [v], 169, iv pp., 4 plates, 6 maps [in end-pocket]. Paris, La Haye: Mouton & Co.; Paris: [Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer], 1976. Fr. 110. - Volume 41 Issue 1
Problem-Generating Structures in Nigeria's Rural Development
Journal Article Problem-Generating Structures in Nigeria's Rural Development Get access Problem-Generating Structures in Nigeria's Rural Development, by Martin Igbozurike. Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1976. 140pp. Figures, tables, bibliography. No price given. Class, Elite and Community in African Development, by Alpheus Manghezi. Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, 1976. 118pp. Tables, bibliography. No pric…
Tshokwe-Zaïre. Recordings and notes by Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger. Tervuren, Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika. (African music recordings series no. 11; series editor Jos Gansemans.) Record
Tshokwe-Zaïre. Recordings and notes by Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger. Tervuren, Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika. (African music recordings series no. 11; series editor Jos Gansemans.) Record: 6803 073; 12 in. stereo 331⁄3 rpm. Booklet: pp. 81 (German, Flemish, French, English), ill. - Volume 49 Issue 2
R. A. Slaney, the industrial town, and early Victorian social policy
(1979). R. A. Slaney, the industrial town, and early Victorian social policy. Social History: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 85-101
Mapping Nigeria's Vegetation from Radar
The State and Early Industrial Capitalism
Journal Article THE STATE AND EARLY INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM: THE CASE OF THE HANDLOOM WEAVERS Get access Paul Richards Paul Richards Norfolk College of Arts and TechnologyKing's Lynn Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 83, Issue 1, May 1979, Pages 91–115, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/83.1.91 Published: 01 May 1979
The environmental factor in African studies
The Penguin Atlas of African History. By Colin McEvedy. London
Upland and swamp rice farming systems in Sierra Leone
IntroductionIt is thought that African rice (Oryza glaberrima), domesticated from the annual wild rice Oryza barthii, a plant of savanna river valleys and water holes, may have been first cultivated along the valley of the upper and middle Niger (Portères, 1970; Harlan, 1975). Cultivation under high rainfall conditions in the forest zone followed the development of 'upland' cultivars. Today, farmers in the drier savannas continue to depend on the…
Tiv song, by Charles Keil. Chicago & London
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Farming systems and agrarian change in West Africa
Ecological Change and the Politics of African Land Use
Spatial Organization as a Theme in African Studies
Environmental Crisis in Africa
Journal Article ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS IN AFRICA: ECOLOGY VERSUS POLITICAL ECONOMY? Get access PAUL RICHARDS PAUL RICHARDS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 84, Issue 336, July 1985, Page 486, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a097717 Published: 01 July 1985
Indigenous Agricultural Revolution
Geographers among the Peasants
Indigenous Agricultural Revolution
Applied Anthropology
Africa in the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Multiplication of Labor
Political science (63 works) · Sociology (63 works) · Geography (49 works) · Law (37 works) · Sierra leone (35 works) · History (30 works) · Agriculture (25 works) · Agriculture and Rural Development Research (25 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (24 works)