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.
Derek Lennard was a longtime member and former chair of LGBT Humanists—then known as the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Group […]
The National Secular Society is a campaigning organisation, founded in 1866 to champion the principles of secularism and the separation […]
Belfast-born Jack McDowell was an activist, educator, politician, and atheist, whose humanism was evident in a lifetime of work for […]
I don’t think it’s the novelist’s job to give answers. He’s only concerned with exposing the human situation… and I […]
