James Frazer
For the Dad's Army character, see Private James Frazer.Sir
James George Frazer (
January 1,
1854,
Glasgow,
Scotland –
May 7,
1941), was a
Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of
mythology and
comparative religion.
He studied at the
University of Glasgow and
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honors in
Classics (his dissertation would be published years later as
The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory) and remained a Classics Fellow all his life. He went on from Trinity to study law at the
Middle Temple and yet never practised. He was four times elected to Trinity's Title Alpha Fellowship, and was associated with the college for most of his life, except for a year,
1907-
1908, spent at the
University of Liverpool. He was knighted in
1914. He was, if not blind, then severely visually impaired from
1930 on.
The study of
myth and
religion became his areas of expertise. Except for
Italy and
Greece, Frazer was not widely travelled. His prime sources of data were ancient histories and questionnaires mailed to missionaries and Imperial officials all over the globe. Frazer's interest in social anthropology was aroused by reading
E. B. Tylor's
Primitive Culture (1871) and encouraged by his friend, the biblical scholar
William Robertson Smith, who was linking the Old Testament with early Hebrew folklore.
Frazer was far from being the first to study religions dispassionately, as a cultural phenomenon rather than from within theology. He was though the first to detail the relations between myths and rituals. His theories of
totemism were superseded by
Claude Lévi-Strauss and his vision of the annual sacrifice of the
Year King has not been borne out by field studies. His generation's choice of
Darwinian evolution as a social
paradigm, interpreted by Frazer as three rising stages of human progress has not proved valid. Yet
The Golden Bough, his study of ancient cults, rites, and myths, including their parallels with early
Christianity, arguably his greatest work, is still rifled by modern mythographers for its detailed information. Notably,
The Golden Bough influenced
René Girard; and led him to study anthropology to develop his
mimesis theory of the
scapegoat. The work's influence spilled well over the conventional bounds of academia, however; the symbolic cycle of life, death and rebirth which Frazer divined behind myths of all pedigrees captivated a whole generation of artists and poets. Perhaps the most notable product of this fascination is
T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land.
The first edition, in two volumes, was published in
1890. The third edition was finished in
1915 and ran to twelve volumes, with a supplemental thirteenth volume added in
1936. He also published a single volume abridgement, largely compiled by his wife Lady Frazer, in
1922, with some controversial material removed from the text.
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Totemism (1887)
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The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, 1st edition (1890)
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Descriptions of Greece, by
Pausanias (translation and commentary) (1897)
*
The Golden Bough, 2nd edition (1900)
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Psyche's Task (1909)
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Totemism and Exogamy (1910)
*
The Golden Bough, 3rd edition (1906-15; 1936)
*
The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, 3 volumes (1913-24)
*
Folk-lore in the Old Testament (1918)
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Apollodorus: the Library (1921)
*
The Worship of Nature (1926)
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The Gorgon's Head and other Literary Pieces (1927)
*
Man, God, and Immortality (1927)
*
Devil's Advocate (1928)
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Fasti, by
Ovid (translation) (1929)
*
Myths of the Origin of Fire (1930)
*
The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory (1930)
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Garnered Sheaves (1931)
*
Condorcet on the Progress of the Human Mind (1933)
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The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion (1933-36)
*
Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogenies, and Other Pieces (1935)
*
Joseph Campbell*
Sir James Frazer: brief analysis
*
The Golden Bough: on-line text, 1922 abridged edition
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Free ebook of James Frazer at
Project Gutenberg
