Paul Richards (anthropologist)

Fighting for the Rain Forest (1996) showed how the involvement of youth in Sierra Leonean rebel movements had little to do with widely perceived "barbarism" of rebel groups in resource-rich regions. War is, also, part of a "performance" with its origins in history, social orders, and human agency. Paul Richards witnessed some of the fighting during the war, continuing to visit the country. The widely held "New Barbarism" theories of Robert D. Kaplan and others had suggested abundant natural resources, like Sierra Leone's blood diamonds, were a magnet for human greed and civil conflict. Instead, Richards has argued that the involvement of youth in the Revolutionary United Front rebel movement was a form of social resistance to matriarchal rule in Sierra Leone, did not appear to have a strong underlying motive of greed (for the diamond revenues), and was a considered response rather than a spontaneous, 'barbaric' movement. Grievances were partly responsible for the violence that undoubtedly did afflict Sierra Leone during its civil war and for which the Revolutionary United Front was partly responsible. Richards has advised aid and humanitarian agencies on African post-war reconstruction, demobilization and skills-training.

Richards argues, following Durkheim, that human technique and skill underpins human action and institutional change. He began by examining everyday livelihood activities like farming. He coined the term "agriculture as performance" based on years of observing the reflexivity of African farmers and their responses to stress and risks, and drawing on his own skills and interest in music and musical performance. His populist faith in African farmers to survive and prosper, despite the magnitude of the risks that faced, was set out in Indigenous Agricultural Revolution (1985), a book that generated fierce debate, since it accused agronomic research and international development organisations of missing the "moving target" of peasant farming and failing to see how innovations took place outside the realm of "formal" science and laboratories. The book's ideas were diametrically opposed to those of more pessimistic observers that lacked detailed field knowledge, that had often accused the same farmers of environmental degradation. Richards has proposed the term "technography" to describe the set of detailed research skills needed by anthropologists, and others, to understand how technology is deployed and used. Technographies have been conducted by teams including several Wageningen University research students and collaborators.

Richards is an anthropological commentator and researcher on agricultural technology and African farming systems. Initially trained in human geography (BSc Queen Mary University of London, 1963–1966) and African Studies (MA SOAS, 1966–1967), he taught in Ibadan, Nigeria before completing a PhD in geography and specialising in Sierra Leone (PhD London, 1973–1977). He has worked in Sierra Leone for over forty years, conducting ethnographic studies of Mende village rice farming systems and forest conservation on the Liberian border. After the region became affected by the Sierra Leonean civil war (1992-2002), he turned to analysis of that conflict and has written more widely on the anthropology of armed conflicts, and the Ebola crisis.

Paul Richards (born 14 May 1945) is an emeritus professor of technology and agrarian development at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and adjunct professor at Njala University in central Sierra Leone. He was formerly a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University College London for many years, and previously taught anthropology and geography, at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.