James George Frazer

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Social and cultural anthropology
v t e

Sir James George Frazer

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.^[9][10][11] His sister Isabella Katherine Frazer married the mathematician John Steggall.^[12]

Work

The

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

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.^{[citation needed]}

Theories of religion and cultural evolution

Among the most influential elements of the third edition of The Golden Bough is Frazer's theory of cultural evolution and the place Frazer assigns religion and magic in that theory. Frazer's theory of cultural evolution was not absolute and could reverse, but sought to broadly describe three (or possibly, four) spheres through which cultures were thought to pass over time.^[21][22] Frazer believed that, over time, culture passed through three stages, moving from magic, to religion, to science. Frazer's classification notably diverged from earlier anthropological descriptions of cultural evolution, including that of Auguste Comte, because he thought magic was both initially separate from religion and invariably preceded religion.^[23][24] He also defined magic separately from belief in the supernatural and superstition, presenting an ultimately ambivalent view of its place in culture.^[25]

Frazer believed that magic and science were similar because both shared an emphasis on experimentation and practicality; his emphasis on this relationship is so broad that almost any disproven scientific hypothesis technically constitutes magic under his system.^[26] In contrast to both magic and science, Frazer defined religion in terms of belief in personal, supernatural forces and attempts to appease them. As historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm describes Frazer's views, Frazer saw religion as "a momentary aberration in the grand trajectory of human thought."^[27] He thus ultimately proposed – and attempted to further – a narrative of secularization and one of the first social-scientific expressions of a disenchantment narrative.

At the same time, Frazer was aware that both magic and religion could persist or return. He noted that magic sometimes returned so as to become science, such as when alchemy underwent a revival in Early Modern Europe and became chemistry. On the other hand, Frazer displayed a deep anxiety about the potential of widespread belief in magic to empower the masses, indicating fears of and biases against lower-class people in his thought.^[28]

Origin-of-death stories

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 Two Messengers

This type of story is common in Africa. Two messages are carried from the supreme being to mankind: one of eternal life and one of death. The messenger carrying the tidings of eternal life is delayed, and so the message of death is received first by mankind.^[30]

The Bantu people of Southern Africa, such as the Zulu, tell that Unkulunkulu, the Old Old One, sent a message that men should not die, giving it to the chameleon. The chameleon was slow and dawdled, taking time to eat and sleep. Unkulunkulu meanwhile had changed his mind and gave a message of death to the lizard who travelled quickly and so overtook the chameleon. The message of death was delivered first and so, when the chameleon arrived with its message of life, mankind would not hear it and so is fated to die.^[30]

Because of this, Bantu people, such as the Ngoni, punish lizards and chameleons. For example, children may be allowed to put tobacco into a chameleon's mouth so that the nicotine poisons it and the creature dies, writhing while turning colours.^[30]

Variations of the tale are found in other parts of Africa. The

In Togoland, the messengers were the dog and the frog, and, as in the Bura version, the messengers go first from mankind to God to get answers to their questions.^[30]

The Story of the Waxing and Waning Moon

The

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

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]

Reputation and criticism

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.

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]

Selected works

• Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies, 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
      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])
• 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)

See also

• Lilly Frazer
• Joseph Campbell
• Archetypal literary criticism
• Mircea Eliade
• René Girard
• Edward Burnett Tylor
• Dying-and-rising deity
• Sacred king
• Seclusion of girls at puberty

References

1. ^
   S2CID 161719297
   .
2. ^ ^{a b} Josephson-Storm (2017), Chapter 5.
3. ^ Mary Beard, "Frazer, Leach, and Virgil: The Popularity (and Unpopularity) of the Golden Bough", Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34.2 (April 1992:203–224).
4. ^
   ISBN 0-902-198-84-X. Archived from the original
   (PDF) on 24 January 2013. Retrieved 7 June 2016.
5. ISBN 3-11-016328-4
6. ^ "Frazer, James George (FRSR874JG)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
7. ^ Address to Sir James George Frazer on the occasion of the foundation, in his honour, of the Frazer Lectureship in Social Anthropology in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow and Liverpool (1920).
8. ^
   doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/66458. Retrieved 27 December 2022. (Subscription or UK public library membership
   required.)
9. ISBN 978-0-521-34093-9
   .
10. ISBN 978-1-136-66241-6
    .
11. S2CID 4110636
    .
12. ISBN 0-902-198-84-X. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 24 January 2013. Retrieved 7 June 2016.
13. ^ D Daiches ed., Companion to Literature 1 (1968) p. 194
14. ^ R Fraser Intro, The Golden Bough (Oxford 2009) p. xl
15. ^ For the history of The Golden Bough see R. Fraser, The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument (London, 1990).
16. ^ Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Life of Savages and Neurotics, trans., A.A. Brill (London: Routledge and Sons, 1919), p. 4
17. ^ "For those who see Frazer's work as the start of anthropological study in its modern sense, the site and the cult of Nemi must hold a particular place: This colourful but minor backwater of Roman religion marks the source of the discipline of Social anthropology", remarks Mary Beard, in noting the critical reassessment of Frazer's work following Edmund Leach, "Frazer, Leach, and Virgil: The Popularity (and Unpopularity) of the Golden Bough", Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34.2 (April 1992:203–224), p. 204.
18. ^ Leach, "Reflections on a visit to Nemi: did Frazer get it wrong?", Anthropology Today 1 (1985)
19. ^ Hawkins, reviewing Volkert Haas, Der Kult von Nerik: ein Beitrag zur hethitischen Religionsgeschichte, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 36.1 (1973:128).
20. ^ Chidester (2014), pp. x–xi, 5, 8; and Chapter 6.
21. ISBN 0429980302
    .
22. ^ On the possibility of a fourth stage see Josephson-Storm (2017), pp. 146–147.
23. ^ Chidester (2014), p. 159.
24. ^ Josephson-Storm (2017), pp. 141–142.
25. ^ Josephson-Storm (2017), pp. 142–143.
26. ^ Malinowski (2014), n. pag.
27. ^ Josephson-Storm (2017), p. 145.
28. ^ Josephson-Storm (2017), pp. 145–147.
29. ISBN 978-1-77007-453-8
30. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4400-4514-1
31. ISBN 978-0-19-517968-2
32. ISBN 978-0-7607-2855-0
    , Long ago, there was no such thing as death. All were therefore surprised when a man died. They sent a worm to the sky to ask Hyel, the supreme deity (Bura, Pabir/Nigeria), what they should do.
33. ^
    ISBN 978-0-8403-6037-3
    , the Bura people ... had an unusually full system of culture embedded in their folk tales.
34. ISBN 978-0-8403-9934-2
    , The motif is a venerable mythic motif, the interrupted message, and raises the question of what would have happened if only, if only ... A worm, in this incarnation of the motif, is to inform the humans that life is everlasting. But a trickster of a lizard overtakes the worm, and gives the wrong message: humans are evanescent. So it is that death comes permanently into the world. And the storyteller adds a scene in which the onus for death is placed entirely on the backs of humans: people are too lazy to retrieve the corpse and hang it on a tree.
35. ^ Larsen 2014, pp. 43–44.
36. ^ Larsen 2014, p. 44.
37. ^ Larsen 2014, p. 46.
38. ^ Larsen 2014, pp. 46–48.
39. ^ ^{a b c d e} Larsen 2014, p. 47.
40. ^ Larsen 2014, pp. 47–48.
41. ^ ^{a b} Larsen 2014, p. 48.
42. ^ Gifford Lecture Series – Books Archived 16 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine at www.giffordlectures.org

Further reading

• 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
  .
• ISBN 978-0-19-965787-2
• Malinowski, Bronislaw (2014). Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Read Books.
  ISBN 978-1473393127
  .
• ISBN 9788883539053

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to James George Frazer.

Wikisource has original works by or about:
James George Frazer

Wikisource has the text of a 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica article about "James George Frazer".

• 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