Though only some anthropologists are humanists, my own anthropological studies confirmed my review of religion as a human art, not requiring any assumptions of an ultimate reality such as God or Mind, independent of the human world.
Raymond Firth, New Humanist, March 1993
Raymond Firth was an influential anthropologist, who made significant contributions to economic anthropology and the study of social organisation. A member of the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) for over three decades, he was also a prominent humanist: an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association, a member of the advisory council of the British Humanist Association (patron of Humanists UK), and a contributor to the edited essay collection The Humanist Outlook (1968). In 1996, Firth published Religion: a Humanist Interpretation, presenting his ‘personal view on the nature and origin of religion’.
See the gallery below for some documents illustrating Raymond Firth’s connection to the humanist movement.
The moral value of a belief in eternal life is a doubtful matter. But this is certain, that where rest […]
The Ruskin School Home was founded by socialist writer and teacher [Harry] Bellerby Lowerison (1863–1935) in Norfolk in 1900, following […]
The notion that a man shall judge for himself what he is told, sifting the evidence and weighing the conclusions, […]
In all her work for the humanist movement, Constance Dowman said little and did much… She was one of the […]
