Frazer, Sir James George

(1854-1941)

Born and educated in Scotland, Frazer came to Cambridge to carry out research in 1879, remaining there for the rest of his long career. Originally trained as a classicist, he came to comparative anthropology under the influence of the work of W. Robertson-Smith and Edward Burnett Tylor , although this was based on correspondence with travellers, rather than on fieldwork, and focused almost exclusively on religion and systems of belief.

Frazer was best known in his lifetime for the much read and many-volumed Golden Bough (1890), in which he examined the meaning of divine sacrifice, compulsively adding more and more examples from ethnography, folklore, mythology, and the Bible. Espousing an evolutionary approach, he claimed to have discovered the intellectual history of human societies, progressing from magic, through religion , to science. He viewed the last of these as a return to magical techniques and logic-but using correct (empirically tested) hypotheses and methodologies. It has been suggested that the huge popularity of his work rested on the implication that Christianity is simply a form of magic, an idea that appealed to emerging rationalistic philosophy. His books are little read now, although it is generally acknowledged that his work stimulated ethnographic activity world-wide.