Richard Borshay Lee

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Richard Borshay Lee OC (born 1937) is a Canadian anthropologist. Lee has studied at the University of Toronto and University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. He holds a position at the University of Toronto as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. Lee researches issues concerning the indigenous people of Botswana and Namibia, particularly their ecology and history.

Known best for his work on the Ju'/hoansi, Lee won the 1980 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his book The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. With Irven DeVore, Lee was co-organiser of the 1966 University of Chicago Symposium on "Man the Hunter".^[1] Lee co-edited with Richard Daly The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter-Gatherers, which was first published in 1999. In 2003, Anthropologica, the journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society, dedicated an issue to Lee's oeuvre. In 2011 he co-authored the children's book Africans Thought of It: Amazing Innovations with Bathseba Opini.

Most recently his research has focused on the anthropology of health and the cultural and social factors in AIDS epidemic in southern Africa for which he has received funds from the National Institutes of Health (U.S.) via Columbia University School of Public Health as well as directly from the University of Toronto.