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 international significance and reputation of Mohandas Gandhi is well-known, but his involvement with the burgeoning humanist movement during the […]
Julia Huxley was a feminist and freethinker, who profoundly influenced a generation of girls who attended the school she founded […]
Why not agree to differ about the questions which no one denies to be all but insoluble, and become allies […]
From the Agnostic Annual, 1900, edited by Charles A. Watts (founder of the Rationalist Press Association). THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, […]
