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.
In order to find meaning to one’s life, one must find a meaning in the life of the [human] race. […]
William of Ockham was the fourteenth century’s most influential philosopher: a key thinker of the Middle Ages and an early […]
To accept life fully seems to me the hallmark of the fine spirit. I think that it is possible for […]
We had to have change. The conditions of the workers had to be improved. The bosses had to be forced […]
