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He wrote the introduction to Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Pacific (1922) Freud wrote his Totem und Tabu (1913), inspired by Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (4 vols., 1910).
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James george frazer professional#
As his reputation among professional anthropologists waned, it increased among the general public. He published a translation of Ovid’s Fasti (1929), a compendium in verse of Roman beliefs and customs related to the calendar. Later in life, Frazer returned to work in classics, publishing a translation and commentary of The Library, a collection of Greek myths attributed to Apollodorus (mid-2nd-century BCE) in 1921. Gillen-drove him to revise many of his works, bringing in a stream of steady advances from his friend and publisher, George MacMillan. Frazer’s constant need for money-and the flood of new information coming in from Australia courtesy of W. A supplement, Aftermath, appeared in 1936, 5 years after Frazer had gone blind and relied on the help of assistants. The Golden Bough grew to 13 volumes (1918) and was edited down to a single volume of 800 pages (1922). As civilizations matured, magic was replaced by religion, which in its turn was shown to make room for science. It highlighted the inability of the “savage” to understand the difference between the natural and the supernatural. The second edition (1900, 3 vols.) carried the subtitle: A Study in Magic and Religion. The thrust of his work, however, remained the same. Frazer’s opinions on religion, especially Christianity, were expressed most strongly in his first edition of The Golden Bough but were gradually toned down or drowned in comparative detail. His Victorian readers were alarmed to see such festivals as the Roman Saturnalia, the Crucifixion of Christ, and Purim linked as rites of renewal.
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He argued that survivals of primitive religion(s), the result of diffusion, could still be found among farmers and other backward populations in Europe and could also be detected in some religious practices current in Christianity. He supported his thesis with multiple anecdotes, both ancient and modern. Its main topic was the Aryan myth of the dying king or priest, whose death reinvigorates life on earth. 1890, 2 vols.), carried the subtitle: A Study in Comparative Religion. The purpose was for others to collect the data in a systematic manner everywhere, so that true comparatists (like Frazer himself) could analyze the whole, preferably from their armchairs.įrazer’s subsequent major work, The Golden Bough (first ed. Especially the latter two topics pushed him further into the direction of anthropology, and in 1887, he created a list of questions for those going into the field: Questions on the Manners, Customs, Religion, Superstitions, etc., of the Uncivilized or Semi-Civilized Peoples.
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Frazer wrote the entries for Penates, Priapus, Proserpina, Pericles, Taboo, and Totem. He invited Frazer to submit some articles, all on the letter “P” and beyond. However, at that time, he worked as an editor for the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Robertson Smith was an ordained minister and worked on biblical subjects he was the (future) author of Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889).
James george frazer free#
Robertson Smith, a fellow Scotsman who had been hired by Cambridge after having been run out of the Free Church College at Aberdeen in 1881 because of his heretical views. Both works greatly influenced Frazer, whose methods were slow and meticulous: For instance, the work on Pausanias may have begun in 1884 but only reached publication 14 years later, in 6 volumes, totaling 3,000 pages. Pausanias lists “survivals” of earlier times, a phenomenon that had been extensively documented by Tylor in his Primitive Culture (1871). This guidebook, the Description of Hellas, lists objects worthy of visiting in Greece, adding legends, stories, and anecdotes about them. Frazer, trained as a classicist and lawyer, first wrote on classical topics: the Roman historian Sallust (1884) and a six-volume edition on the 2nd century CE Greek antiquarian Pausanias (1898).