Background
FIRTH, Raymond was born on March 25, 1901 in Auckland, New Zealand. Son of Wesley Hugh Bourne Firth and Marie Elizabeth Jane Firth (nee Cartmill).
FIRTH, Raymond was born on March 25, 1901 in Auckland, New Zealand. Son of Wesley Hugh Bourne Firth and Marie Elizabeth Jane Firth (nee Cartmill).
He was educated at Auckland Grammar School.
He studied at Auckland University College, where he graduated in economics in 1921. He took his MA there in 1922, and a diploma in social science in 1923.
In 1924 he began his doctoral research at the London School of Economics. Originally intending to complete a thesis in economics, a chance meeting with the eminent social anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski led to him to alter his field of study to 'blending economic and anthropological theory with Pacific ethnography'. It was possibly during this period in England that he worked as research assistant to Sir James G Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. Firth's doctoral thesis was published in 1929 as Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Māori.
After receiving his PhD in 1927 Firth returned to the southern hemisphere to take up a position at the University of Sydney, although he did not start teaching immediately as a research opportunity presented itself. In 1928 he first visited Tikopia, the southernmost of the Solomon Islands, to study the untouched Polynesian society there, resistant to outside influences and still with its pagan religion and undeveloped economy.
In 1930 he started teaching at the University of Sydney. On the departure for Chicago of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Firth succeeded him as acting Professor. He also took over from Radcliffe-Brown as acting editor of the journal Oceania, and as acting director of the Anthropology Research Committee of the Australian National Research Committee.
Firth succeeded Malinowski as Professor of Social Anthropology at London School of Economics in 1944, and he remained at the School for the next 24 years. He returned to Tikopia on research visits several times, although as travel and fieldwork requirements became more burdensome he focused on family and kinship relationships in working- and middle-class London.Firth left London School of Economics in 1968, when he took up a year's appointment as Professor of Pacific Anthropology at the University of Hawaiʻi. There followed visiting professorships at British Columbia (1969), Cornell (1970), Chicago (1970-1), the Graduate School of the City University of New York (1971) and University of California Davis (1974). The second festschrift published in his honour described him as 'perhaps the greatest living teacher of anthropology today'.
1940 Fellow of the British Academy
1973 Knighted
1981 Bronislaw Malinowski Award
2001 Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit
2002 Received the first Leverhulme Medal for a scholar of international distinction.
The Kauri Gum Industry 1924, Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori 1929, Art and Life in New Guinea 1936, We, The Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia 1936, Human Types 1938, Primitive Polynesian Economy 1939, The Work of the Gods in Tikopia 1940, Malay Fishermen: Their Peasant Economy 1946, Elements of Social Organization 1951. Editor Two Studies of Kinship in London 1956, Editor Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Malinowski 1957, Social Change in Tikopia 1959, History and Traditions of Tikopia 1961, Essays on Social Organization and Values 1964, Editor Themes in Economic Anthropology 1967. Tikopia Ritual and Belief 1967, Rank and Religion in Tikopia 1970, Families and their Relatives (with Jane Hubert and Anthony Forge) 1970, The Sceptical Anthropologist, Social Anthropology and Marxist Views of Society 1972, Symbols Public and Private 1973, Tikopia-English Dictionary 1985.
New Zealand Association of Social Anthropologists. American Academy, of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, Royal Society of N.S.W., Royal Society of New Zealand, Royal Danish Academy, of Sciences and Letters.