Richard Borshay Lee

Harvard University (1965–1970)

Following his doctorate, Lee was appointed Lecturer in Social Anthropology in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University from 1965 to 1967. He then held a Research Fellowship in the Department of Social Relations and the Center for Behavioral Sciences at Harvard from 1967 to 1970.^[10]

During this period, he co-founded with Irven DeVore the Harvard Kalahari Research Group, which became one of the most productive centres for hunter-gatherer studies in the world, training a generation of scholars who went on to make significant contributions in their own right.^[2]

Rutgers University (1970–1972)

Lee was appointed Associate Professor of Anthropology with tenure at Rutgers University, New Jersey, from 1970 to 1972.^[10]

University of Toronto (1972–2007)

Lee joined the University of Toronto as Associate Professor of Anthropology in 1972 and was promoted to full Professor with tenure in 1976. In 1999 he was appointed University Professor, the highest academic rank at the University of Toronto, recognising scholars of exceptional distinction whose work has transcended disciplinary boundaries.^[1] He retired as University Professor Emeritus in 2007.^[1]

During his tenure at Toronto he held a Connaught Senior Fellowship in the Social Sciences (1982–83), a Visiting Professorship at Columbia University, New York (Fall 1980), a Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Australian National University, Canberra (1995), and a Visiting Scholarship at the Center for African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan (Fall 2001).^[12]

Subsequent positions

Following retirement from Toronto, Lee was a Visiting Professor at Galen University, San Ignacio, Belize (2007–08).^[12]

The "Man the Hunter" symposium (1966)

In 1966, Lee and Irven DeVore co-organised the "Man the Hunter" symposium at the University of Chicago, bringing together leading researchers on hunter-gatherer societies from around the world.^[4] The resulting edited volume, Man the Hunter (Aldine, 1968), became one of the most widely cited works in anthropology, reshaping scholarly understanding of pre-agricultural human life.^[4]

At the symposium, Lee presented quantitative data on the Ju/'hoansi showing that they were able to meet their subsistence needs by working approximately fifteen hours per week in food production. This data was a key source for Marshall Sahlins's subsequent formulation of the "original affluent society" thesis, which argued that hunter-gatherers had achieved a form of material sufficiency through limited wants rather than maximal production.^[5]

The !Kung San and Dobe Ju/'hoansi

Lee's most influential work is The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge University Press, 1979), a comprehensive study of Ju/'hoansi subsistence, social organisation, gender relations, and ecology. The book won the 1980 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the 1980 Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association.^[3]

His ethnographic monograph The Dobe !Kung (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983), revised as The Dobe Ju/'hoansi in its second (1993), third (2003), and fourth (2013) editions, became one of the most widely used teaching texts in cultural anthropology globally.^[1]

The Kalahari Debate

Lee's work became central to what became known as the "Kalahari Debate," a scholarly controversy concerning the degree to which the Ju/'hoansi and other San peoples had been influenced by contact with neighbouring Bantu-speaking agricultural peoples and with colonial and post-colonial states. Lee argued for the validity of using Ju/'hoansi society as a model for understanding pre-agricultural human life, a position challenged by revisionist scholars who emphasised the long history of San interaction with neighbouring peoples.^[2]

Medical anthropology and HIV/AIDS

From the mid-1990s, Lee's research increasingly focused on the social and cultural dimensions of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern Africa. He received funding from the National Institutes of Health via Columbia University School of Public Health (1996–2001) and subsequently from the University of Toronto (2000–05) for work on AIDS awareness and education in Namibia and Botswana.^[12]

Indigenous rights

Lee was active in advocacy for the rights of San peoples of southern Africa throughout his career. He co-edited a special issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly on "The Kalahari San: Self-Determination in the Desert" (2002) with Robert Hitchcock and Megan Biesele, and contributed to international discussions of indigenous land rights and cultural survival.^[1]