Sir James George Frazer

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Sir James George Frazer, 1933. (credit: T & R Annan & Sons, Ltd., Glasgow)

(born Jan. 1, 1854, Glasgow, Scot. — died May 7, 1941, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.) British anthropologist, folklorist, and classical scholar. Frazer attended Glasgow University and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a professor and remained the rest of his life. In The Golden Bough (1890; enlarged to 12 vols., 1911 – 15), Frazer examined the evolution of modes of thought from the magical to the religious and, finally, to the scientific. Although his evolutionary sequence is no longer accepted, Frazer's synthesis of the new science of cultural anthropology with traditional humanistic concerns and his lively descriptions of exotic cultural beliefs and practices had a wide influence. His other works include Totemism and Exogamy (1910) and Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918).

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Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), a British classicist and anthropologist, was the author of "The Golden Bough," a classic study of magic and religion. It popularized anthropology.

James Frazer was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on Jan. 1, 1854. He attended Glasgow University (1869-1874), where his major interest was the classics. He continued his studies in classics at Trinity College at Cambridge and was elected a fellow of the college in 1879. He remained at Cambridge the rest of his life, except for an appointment as professor of social anthropology at Liverpool University in 1907, which he resigned after a year.

Frazer continued his interest in classics, editing Sallust's Catilina et lugurtha (1884), translating Pausanias's Description of Greece (1898), and editing and translating Ovid's Fasti (1929).

Frazer's early classical interests were considerably broadened through acquaintance with Sir Edward Tylor's Primitive Culture. Frazer decided that ancient rituals and myths could be illuminated by examination of similar customs of modern peoples living in a "savage" or "barbarous" stage. He borrowed Tylor's comparative method and developed his own method of comparison of customs of peoples of all times and places, which he retained throughout his lifelong research. His results have been criticized on the grounds that he took customs out of cultural context and that many of the customs compared were only superficially similar.

Early in his career as a fellow at Cambridge, Frazer met W. Robertson Smith, who stimulated his interest in comparative religion. Frazer's interest in totemism derived from Smith's invitation to write the article on the subject for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1888).

Frazer never did fieldwork. He spent all his life in the library, working 12, often 15, hours a day, almost everyday. He obtained ethnographic information from the accounts of travelers, missionaries, and colonial administrators. To obtain desired information he prepared a questionnaire on "the manners, customs, religions, superstitions, etc., of uncivilized or semi-civilized peoples" (1887).

The first edition of The Golden Bough appeared in 1890. A second, expanded edition appeared in 1900, and a third, much expanded edition in 1911-1915. One reason for the great success of The Golden Bough is its excellent, if ornate, Victorian prose style. Today it is probably read as much for its literary merits as for its anthropological content.

Frazer was an inductivist; hence, his work is characterized by a sparsity of theory and much information. The general framework for the wealth of information, always so well phrased if too often oversimplified, is the idea that magic has given rise to religion, which in turn has given rise to science, in evolutionary stages. Magic is an attempt to control nature in which erroneous assumptions are made. When, in the course of time, the "savage" discovers that magic does not work, he gives up the attempt to control nature and instead seeks to propitiate or cajole the spirits or gods, which practice constitutes religion. Finally, in a higher state of civilization, man returns to the attempt to control nature, this time employing the experimental and objective techniques which constitute science. Frazer's distinction between magic and religion has proved valid, but the idea that an evolutionary stage of magic invariably preceded religion is invalid, as religious sentiments have been observed in very primitive peoples.

Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy (1910) is an expansion of his early work on totemism. His Folk-lore in the Old Testament (1923), Man, God and Immortality (1927), a collection of his writings on human progress, and many other works appeared in many volumes and in many editions. Though his ideas either have been disproved or amalgamated into more sophisticated theories, Frazer was perhaps the most honored anthropologist of all times. He was knighted in 1914 and awarded the British Order of Merit in 1925. He died in Cambridge on May 7, 1941.

Further Reading

An adulatory account of Frazer's life and work is given by his secretary, Robert Angus Downie, in James George Frazer: The Portrait of a Scholar (1940). A vivid description of Frazer and a more impartial analysis of his contributions constitute a chapter in Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man (1961). Bronislaw Malinowski devotes a biographical appreciation to Frazer in A Scientific Theory of Culture, and Other Essays (1944).

Frazer, Sir James (1854-1941). Anthropologist. Frazer was born in Glasgow, and was elected to a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1879, which he held for the rest of his life. He published The Golden Bough (1890), a pioneer work of comparative anthropology, which occupied him until the 1930s. The evolution of society was, Frazer suggested, from magic to religion and then to science. Prodigiously dedicated, he amassed a vast pile of evidence, much of it printed in Anthologia anthropologica (1938, 1939).

An anthropologist who held that all human societies have evolved through similar stages of magical and religious belief. These he established by comparing ancient mythologies with the beliefs and rituals of tribal societies in Africa, Australia, or the Americas, and with recent folk customs—since the latter, he claimed, contained items surviving from earlier stages, albeit corrupted and misunderstood. This non-historical cross-cultural approach was typical of his period; it is now rejected as invalid by anthropologists and folklorists, but its influence can still be seen in many popular works.

Frazer's major book was The Golden Bough, on which he worked throughout his life; the first edition (1890) was in two volumes, the second (1900) in three, the third (1911-15) in twelve. Modern readers often use the one-volume abridgement (1922), where the arguments stand out more clearly, stripped of their massive footnotes and many examples; this is a pity, since the data remain valuable even where the interpretations are obsolete.

The Golden Bough was widely acclaimed, and influenced several major poets and novelists in the inter-war years; to the general public, it remains the best-known, and most emotionally persuasive, study of myth and folklore. Frazer launched the idea of a sacred king who had to be killed when he grew old, because his virility was identified with the life-force of the crops; he stressed the importance of the annual cycle of vegetation, and especially cereal crops, which he linked to the myths of dying-and-rising gods in Near Eastern religions; he distinguished usefully between ‘imitative’ and ‘contagious’ magic; he had much to say about taboos, tree-worship, human and animal sacrifice, scapegoats, fire-festivals, and much else. The logical links between these many topics are weak, and the accumulated data sometimes hardly relevant to the theories they are meant to support; his speculations regularly go far beyond what the evidence will bear, and he sometimes adds to the confusion by allowing incompatible interpretations to coexist. But his dramatic ideas and colourful, emotive style were most persuasive, and his influence endures; whenever ‘fertility cults’ are offered as an explanation of folk custom, an echo of Frazer can be heard.Ackerman, 1987; Dorson, 1968: 283-8.

Bibliography
• Ackerman, R. (1990). J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work.

Quotes:

"The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology."