Frazer, Sir James George

James George Frazer
James George Frazer
Born	1 January 1854 (1854-01) Glasgow, Scotland
Died	7 May 1941(1941-05-07) (aged 87)
Nationality	Scottish
Fields	social anthropologist
Known for	mythology and comparative religion

Sir James George Frazer (1 January 1854, Glasgow– 7 May 1941, Cambridge), was a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.^[1]

His most famous work, The Golden Bough (1890), documents and details similar magical and religious beliefs across the globe. Frazer posited that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Selected works 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

[edit] Biography

Born in Glasgow, Frazer attended school at Springfield Academy and Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh.^[2] 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.^[3] 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, and a public lectureship in social anthropology at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow and Liverpool was established in his honour in 1921.^[4] He was, if not blind, then severely visually impaired from 1930 on. He and his wife, Lily, died within a few hours of each other. They are buried at the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge, England.

The study of myth and religion became his areas of expertise. Except for visits to Italy and Greece, Frazer was not widely traveled. 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—magic giving rise to religion, then culminating in science—has not proved valid.^[5] 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. The work's influence spilled well over the conventional bounds of academia; 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 poem The Waste Land (1922). More recently it was an influence on the ending of Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (a copy of The Golden Bough figures in one of the final shots).

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.^[6]

Jane Ellen Harrison, a respected historian of Greek religion and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, gave Frazer's immensely popular work academic credibility, and it has retained the reputation of a middle-brow classic.^[7]

Frazer's pioneering work^[8] has come under criticism by more recent scholars, following a series of critical, even vituperative articles by Edmund Leach, one of which was selected as the lead article in Anthropology Today, vol. 1 (1985);^[9] in part Frazer's Golden Bough was criticised for the breadth of comparisons drawn from widely separated cultures, but the criticism is often based on the abridged edition, which omits the supportive archaeological details. In a positive review of a work narrowly focusing on the cultus in the Hittite city of Nerik, J. D. Hawkins remarked approvingly in 1973, "The whole work is very methodical and sticks closely to the fully quoted documentary evidence in a way that would have been unfamiliar to the late Sir James Frazer."^[10] Frazer's six volume commentary on the Greek traveler Pausanias' description of Greece in the mid 2nd c. AD remains one of his most important works although archaeological excavations have added enormously to our knowledge of Greece since his time. There is still much of value in his detailed historical and topographical discussions of different sites and his eyewitness accounts of Greece at the end of the 19th century.

[edit] Selected works

• Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogenies, and Other Pieces (1935)
• The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion (1933–36)
• Condorcet on the Progress of the Human Mind (1933)
• Garnered Sheaves (1931)
• The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory (1930)
• Myths of the Origin of Fire (1930)
• Fasti, by Ovid (text, translation and commentary), 5 volumes (1929)
  • one-volume abridgement (1931)
    • revised by G. P. Goold (1989, corr. 1996): ISBN 0-674-99279-2
• Devil's Advocate (1928)
• Man, God, and Immortality (1927)
• The Gorgon's Head and other Literary Pieces (1927)
• The Worship of Nature (1926) (from 1923–25 Gifford Lectures,^[11])
• The Library, by Apollodorus (text, translation and notes), 2 volumes (1921): ISBN 0-674-99135-4 (vol. 1); ISBN 0-674-99136-2 (vol. 2)
• Folk-lore in the Old Testament (1918)
• The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, 3 volumes (1913–24)
• The Golden Bough, 3rd edition: 12 volumes (1906–15; 1936)
  • 1922 one-volume abridgement: ISBN 0-486-42492-8
• Totemism and Exogamy (1910)
• Psyche's Task (1909)
• The Golden Bough, 2nd edition: expanded to 6 volumes (1900)
• Pausanias, and other Greek sketches (1900)
• Description of Greece, by Pausanias (translation and commentary) (1897-) 6 volumes.
• The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, 1st edition (1890)
• Totemism (1887)

[edit] See also

• Joseph Campbell
• Archetypal literary criticism
• Edward Burnett Tylor
• Life-death-rebirth deity
• Sacred king
• The Seclusion of Girls at Puberty

[edit] References

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (May 2008)

• Jan Harold Brunvard, American Folklore; An Encyclopedia, s.v. "Superstition" (p 692-697)

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: James George Frazer

• Sir James Frazer: brief analysis
• Sir James George Frazer Collection at Bartleby.com
• Works by James Frazer at Project Gutenberg
• Works by James Frazer at the Internet Archive

Persondata
Name	Frazer, James
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1 January 1854
Place of birth	Glasgow, Scotland
Date of death	7 May 1941
Place of death