James G. Frazer
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, and educated at the University of Glasgow
with a second baccalaureate at Trinity College at Cambridge, James Frazer
is a noteworthy British anthropologist
and is among a group of late nineteenth-century scholars known as Intellectualists
(a group generally interested in using evolutionary theory to study early
humans in light of their mental abilities). He was also concerned with
studying cultural phenomena through the lens of the comparative method,
assuming that collecting descriptive information on many variations of,
for instance, a particular institution, would help to shed light on the
origins of the institution. Looking solely within one culture
was therefore not sufficient to explain the origins and role of actions
or beliefs. Instead of doing fieldwork himself, Frazer (like all early
anthropologists) relied on the letters, journals, and manuscripts from
missionaries, explorers, and military personnel (indicating the intimate,
though sometimes unrecognized, link between European colonial
expansion, on the one hand, and gains in scientific knowledge, on the
other). Frazer wrote, in his first book The Golden Bough, about
the behaviors of the participants in a Hellenistic ritual and then compared
their actions to that of modern "primitives." The Golden
Bough examined an ancient ritual that is said to take place in the
city of Aricia, near Rome. The ritual involves a priest whose duty it
was to guard the grove near Lake Nemi. If a slave happened to escape from
his master and kill the priest, he would win his freedom but also take
on the responsibility of guarding the grove. Frazer was fascinated by
this story for its insights into what he called the "primitive mind."
Through his research Frazer hoped to shed light on the current behaviors
of those involved in "primitive" religions by using his method
of comparative studies. Frazer's thesis (similar to that fellow Intellectualist
E. B. Tylor's)
was that the mental capacities of humankind developed in the same evolutionary
way as did the human body. Further, Frazer hypothesized that magic was
the behavioral predecessor of religion
just as religion was the intellectual predecessor of science, therefore,
modern "primitives" could have much in common with the classical
Hellenistic mind. Frazer has played a major role in the study of religion
through his impact on modern scholars. Although The Golden Bough
grew into a vast, multi-volume work that few people might read in its
entirety today, it is one of the first scholarly books that consistently
employed the comparative method.
"Along with the view of the world as pervaded by spiritual forces,
savage man has a different, and probably still older, conception in which
we may detect a germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of
nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without
the intervention of personal agency. The germ of which I speak is involved
in that sympathetic magic, as it may be called, which plays a large part
in most systems of superstition."
- from James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
Secondary Literature on Frazer and Religion
Jonathan Z. Smith, The Glory, Jest, and Riddle. James George Frazer
and the Golden Bough. Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1969.
Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, pp. 87-94. Open
Court Press, 1986.
Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory
Text, chapter 3. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Walter H. Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline,
pp. 71-74. Fortress Press, 1995.
Daniel Pals, Seven Theories of Religion, chapter 1. Oxford University
Robert Ackerman, "Frazer, James G.," The Encyclopedia of
Religion, 2nd edition. vol. 5, pp. 3190-3193. Macmillan, 2005.