Dr. Richard Borshay Lee (1937- )
Brief biography
Oral history interview recorded July 10, 2025
Interviewer: Bernard A. Wood
Richard Lee, a proud Canadian, spent most of his career at the University of Toronto, where, until his retirement, he was a University Professor. One of Canada’s most distinguished scientists, Lee is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of The Royal Society of Canada, and in 2017, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for his contributions to the advancement of science, in particular recognizing the significance and influence of his pioneering ethnographic studies of the Ju/’hoansi-!Kung San of Botswana. Lee is also a past-President of the Canadian Anthropological Society/Sociétié canadienne d’anthropologie.
Lee studied anthropology at the University of Toronto, earning both a BA and an MA. In his interview, he explains how he was recruited into the Anthropology graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley, where he successfully defended his dissertation entitled Subsistence Ecology of !Kung Bushmen in 1965. Lee’s advisor, Irven DeVore moved to Harvard University in 1963, so although he was still enrolled as a graduate student at Berkeley, Lee’s base shifted to Harvard and in 1963 he made the first of many field trips to study the Ju/’hoansi-!Kung San in Botswana as part of the Harvard Kalahari Expedition. Lee was employed by Harvard University as a Graduate Research Anthropologist from 1963 to 1965. From 1965 to 1967 Lee continued his field studies as a lecturer in Social Anthropology and from 1967-70 as a research fellow in the Department of Social Relations and Centre for Behavioral Sciences at Harvard. Lee spent 1970-1972 as Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University before returning to the University of Toronto, where in 1976 he was promoted to Professor, and in 1999 he was made a University Professor.
In addition to his own and joint fieldwork with DeVore in Botswana, Lee has studied foraging societies in Tanzania, Namibia, Alaska, Australia, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Labrador. Lee has also been involved with indigenous human rights, the effect of global capitalism on the world’s indigenous peoples, the anthropology of health, and the cultural and social aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern Africa.
Lee’s books include Man the Hunter with DeVore (1968), Kalahari Hunter Gathers edited by Lee and DeVore (1976), Politics and History in Band Societies (1982) and The Dobe Ju/’hoansi (2003). His book The !Kung San: Men and Women and Work in a Foraging Society (1979) was listed by the American Scientist as one of the 100 most important works in science of the 20th century.
Richard Borshay Lee Oral History Videos
Oral History Transcript
The transcript below is free to read and download.
Selected Publications: Books
1968 Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds. Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.
1974 Joseph B. Jorgenson and Richard B. Lee eds. The New Native Resistance: Indigenous People’s Struggles and the Responsibility of Scholars. New York: MSS Modular publications, Module #6.
1976 Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds. Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and their Neighbours. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
1979 Richard B. Lee. The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
1982 Eleanor Leacock and Richard B. Lee, eds. Politics and History in Band Societies. Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and La Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
1999 Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly, eds. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
2004 William Haviland, Shirley Fedorak, Gary Crawford and Richard Lee. Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Second Canadian Edition. Toronto: Nelson-Thompson Publishing.
2011 Bathseba Opini and Richard B. Lee. The Africans Thought of it: Amazing Innovations. Toronto: Annick Press (for children).
2013 Richard B. Lee. The Dobe Ju/’hoansi. Belmont CA; Cengage Wadsworth, Case Studies in Anthropology, Fourth Edition.