Raymond Firth

Raymond Firth was a New Zealand-born ethnologist who worked primarily in Britain, born in Auckland in 1901. He earned his doctorate at the London School of Economics under Bronislaw Malinowski, whom he later succeeded as professor of anthropology there, holding the chair from 1944 to 1968. Firth is credited with founding British economic anthropology and drew an influential theoretical distinction between social organization, the actual behavior of a society, and social structure, its idealized behavioral rules. His best known work, We the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia (1936), grew out of extensive fieldwork on the Solomon Islands atoll of Tikopia and remains a foundational text in Pacific ethnography; he also researched Maori economics and Malaysian fishing communities. He died in London in 2002 at the age of one hundred.