James George Frazer

He was born on 1 January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Katherine Brown and Daniel F. Frazer, a chemist.[4]

Frazer attended school at Springfield Academy and Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh.[5] He studied at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honours in classics (his dissertation was published years later as The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory) and remained a Classics Fellow all his life.[6] From Trinity, he went on to study law at the Middle Temple, but never practised.

Four times elected to Trinity's Title Alpha Fellowship, he was associated with the college for most of his life, except for the 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.[7] He was, if not blind, then severely visually impaired from 1930 on. He and his wife, Lilly, died in Cambridge, England, within a few hours of each other.[8] He died on 7 May 1941.[4] They are buried at the St Giles aka Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge.[8]

His sister Isabella Katherine Frazer married the mathematician John Steggall.[9]

Frazer is commonly interpreted as an atheist in light of his criticism of Christianity and especially Roman Catholicism in The Golden Bough. However, his later writings and unpublished materials suggest an ambivalent relationship with Neoplatonism and Hermeticism.[2]

In 1896 Frazer married Elizabeth "Lilly" Grove, a writer whose father was from Alsace.[8] She would later adapt Frazer's Golden Bough as a book of children's stories, The Leaves from the Golden Bough.[10][11][12]

The study of myth and religion became his areas of expertise. Except for visits to 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 was also encouraged by his friend, the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, who was comparing elements of the Old Testament with early Hebrew folklore.

Frazer was the first scholar to describe in detail the relations between myths and rituals. His vision of the annual sacrifice of the Year-King has not been borne out by field studies. Yet The Golden Bough, his study of ancient cults, rites, and myths, including their parallels in early Christianity, continued for many decades to be studied by modern mythographers for its detailed information.[13]

The first edition, in two volumes, was published in 1890; and a second, in three volumes, in 1900.[14] The third edition was finished in 1915 and ran to twelve volumes, with a supplemental thirteenth volume added in 1936. He published a single-volume abridged version, largely compiled by his wife Lady Frazer, in 1922, with some controversial material on Christianity excluded from the text.[15] The work's influence extended well beyond the conventional bounds of academia, inspiring the new work of psychologists and psychiatrists. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, cited Totemism and Exogamy frequently in his own Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics.[16]

The symbolic cycle of life, death and rebirth which Frazer divined behind myths of many peoples captivated a generation of artists and poets. Perhaps the most notable product of this fascination is T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922).

Frazer's pioneering work[17] has been criticised by late-20th-century scholars. For instance, in the 1980s the social anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote a series of critical articles, one of which was featured as the lead in Anthropology Today, vol. 1 (1985).[18] Leach criticised The Golden Bough for the breadth of comparisons drawn from widely separated cultures, but often based his comments on the abridged edition, which omits the supportive archaeological details. In a positive review of a book narrowly focused 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."[19] More recently, The Golden Bough has been criticised for what are widely perceived as imperialist, anti-Catholic, classist and racist elements, including Frazer's assumptions that European peasants, Aboriginal Australians and Africans represented fossilised, earlier stages of cultural evolution.[20]

Another important work by Frazer is his six-volume commentary on the Greek traveller Pausanias' description of Greece in the mid-2nd century AD. Since his time, archaeological excavations have added enormously to the knowledge of ancient Greece, but scholars still find 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.

Frazer collected stories from throughout the British Empire and devised four general classifications into which many of them could be grouped:[29][30]

The Story of the Waxing and Waning Moon

The phases of the moon

The moon regularly seems to disappear and then return. This gave primitive peoples the idea that man should or might return from death in a similar way. Stories that associate the moon with the origin of death are found especially around the Pacific region. In Fiji, it is said that the moon suggested that mankind should return as he did. But the rat god, Ra Kalavo, would not permit this, insisting that men should die like rats. In Australia, the Wotjobaluk aborigines say that the moon used to revive the dead until an old man said that this should stop. The Cham have it that the goddess of good luck used to revive the dead, but the sky-god sent her to the moon so she could not do this any more.[30]

The Story of the Serpent and His Cast Skin

A snake shedding its skin

Animals which shed their skin, such as snakes and lizards, appeared to be immortal to primitive people. This led to stories in which mankind lost the ability to do this. For example, in Vietnam, it was said that the Jade Emperor sent word from heaven to mankind that, when they became old, they should shed their skins while the serpents would die and be buried. But some snakes overheard the command and threatened to bite the messenger unless he switched the message, so that man would die while snakes would be eternally renewed. For the natives of the island of Nias, the story was that the messenger who completed their creation failed to fast and ate bananas rather than crabs. If he had eaten the latter, then mankind would have shed their skins like crabs and so lived eternally.[30]

The Story of the Banana

Dead banana plants

The banana plant bears its fruit on a stalk which dies after bearing. This gave people such as the Nias islanders the idea that they had inherited this short-lived property of the banana rather than the immortality of the crab. The natives of Poso also based their myth on this property of the banana. Their story is that the creator in the sky would lower gifts to mankind on a rope and, one day, a stone was offered to the first couple. They refused the gift as they did not know what to do with it, so the creator took it back and lowered a banana. The couple ate this with relish, but the creator told them that they would live as the banana, perishing after having children rather than remaining everlasting like the stone.[30]

Frazer married in 1896 and his new wife perceived that Frazer's reputation was not equal to his abilities. Lilly Frazer had the pushiness that he lacked, and she became his manager and publicist guarding access to his office. He did not care too much for prizes but she valued them. She was particularly involved in publishing his work, where she arranged translation to French, and to children, where she adapted his stories.[8]

According to historian Timothy Larsen, Frazer used scientific terminology and analogies to describe ritual practices, and conflated magic and science together, such as describing the "magic wand of science".[35] Larsen criticizes Frazer for baldly characterized magical rituals as "infallible" without clarifying that this is merely what believers in the rituals thought.[36] Larsen has said that Frazer's vivid descriptions of magical practices were written with the intention to repel readers, but, instead, these descriptions more often allured them.[37]

Larsen also criticizes Frazer for applying western European Christian ideas, theology, and terminology to non-Christian cultures. This distorts those cultures to make them appear more Christian.[38] Frazer routinely described non-Christian religious figures by equating them with Christian ones.[39] Frazer applied Christian terms to functionaries, for instance calling the elders of the Njamus of East Africa "equivalent to the Levites of Israel"[39] and the Grand Lama of Lhasa "the Buddhist Pope... the man-god who bore his people's sorrows, the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep".[39] He routinely uses the specifically Christian theological terms "born again", "new birth", "baptism", "christening", "sacrament", and "unclean" in reference to non-Christian cultures.[39]

When Frazer's Australian colleague Walter Baldwin Spencer requested to use native terminology to describe Aboriginal Australian cultures, arguing that doing so would be more accurate, since the Christian terms were loaded with Christian connotations that would be completely foreign to members of the cultures he was describing, Frazer insisted that he should use Abrahamic terms instead, telling him that using native terms would be off-putting and would seem pedantic.[39] A year later, Frazer excoriated Spencer for refusing to equate the non-estrangement of Aboriginal Australian totems with the Christian doctrine of reconciliation.[40] When Spencer, who had studied the aboriginals firsthand, objected that the ideas were not remotely similar, Frazer insisted that they were exactly equivalent.[41] Based on these exchanges, Larsen concludes that Frazer's deliberate use of Judeo-Christian terminology in the place of native terminology was not to make native cultures seem less strange, but rather to make Christianity seem more strange and barbaric.[41]

• 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)
• Taboo and the Perils of the Soul (1911)
• The Gorgon's Head and other Literary Pieces (1927)
• The Worship of Nature (1926) (from 1923 to 1925 Gifford Lectures,[42])
• 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 3 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)
• Jan Harold Brunvard, American Folklore; An Encyclopedia, s.v. "Superstition" (p 692-697)

• Ackerman, Robert (1987). J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521340934.
• Ackerman, Robert (2002). The Myth & Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. New York: Routledge. ISBN 1135371121.
• Ackerman, Robert, (2015). "J. G. Frazer and Religion", in BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
• Ackerman, Robert, 2018. « L’anthropologue qui meurt et ressuscite : vie et œuvre de James George Frazer » in Bérose - Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie
• Chidester, David (2014). Empire of Religion: Imperialism & Comparative Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226117577.
• Fraser, Robert (1990). The Making of "The Golden Bough". New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 1349207209.
• Josephson-Storm, Jason (2017). "Chapter 5: The Decline of Magic: J.G. Frazer". The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.
• Larsen, Timothy (2014), "James George Frazer", The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, pp. 37–79, ISBN 978-0-19-965787-2
• Malinowski, Bronislaw (2014). Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Read Books. ISBN 978-1473393127.
• Giacomo Scarpelli, Il razionalista pagano. Frazer e la filosofia del mito, Milano, Meltemi 2018 ISBN 9788883539053

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• Resources related to research : BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. "Frazer, James George (1854-1941)", Paris, 2015. (ISSN 2648-2770)
• Petri Liukkonen. "James George Frazer". Books and Writers.
• Sir James George Frazer Collection at Bartleby.com
• Works by James George Frazer at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about James George Frazer at Internet Archive
• Works by James George Frazer at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Trinity College Chapel: Sir James George Frazer
• James George Frazer at Find a Grave
• Portraits of James George Frazer at the National Portrait Gallery, London