| James George Frazer | |
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Sir James George Frazer
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| Born | 1 January 1854 Glasgow, Scotland |
| Died | 7 May 1941 (aged 87) Cambridge, England |
| Nationality | Scottish |
| Fields | social anthropologist |
| Alma mater | University of Glasgow (MA 1874) |
| Known for | mythology and comparative religion |
| Notable awards | Fellow of the Royal Society[1] |
Sir James George Frazer FRS[1] FRSE FBA OM (1 January 1854, Glasgow – 7 May 1941, Cambridge), was a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.[2] He is often considered one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology.
His most famous work, The Golden Bough (1890), documents and details similar magical and religious beliefs across the globe. Frazer posited that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science.
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Born in Glasgow, Frazer attended school at Springfield Academy and Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh.[3] He studied at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honours in Classics (his dissertation would be published years later as The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory) and remained a Classics Fellow all his life.[4] He went on from Trinity to study law at the Middle Temple and yet never practised. He was four times elected to Trinity's Title Alpha Fellowship, and was associated with the college for most of his life, except for a 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.[5] He was, if not blind, then severely visually impaired from 1930 on. He and his wife, Lily, died within a few hours of each other. They are buried at the Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge, England.
The study of myth and religion became his areas of expertise. Except for visits to Italy and Greece, Frazer was not widely traveled. 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 encouraged by his friend, the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, who was linking the Old Testament with early Hebrew folklore.
Frazer was far from being the first to study religions dispassionately, as a cultural phenomenon rather than from within theology. He was, though, the first to detail the relations between myths and rituals. His theories of totemism were superseded by Claude Lévi-Strauss and his vision of the annual sacrifice of the Year-King has not been borne out by field studies. His generation's choice of Darwinian evolution as a social paradigm, interpreted by Frazer as three rising stages of human progress—magic giving rise to religion, then culminating in science—has not proved valid.[6] Yet The Golden Bough, his study of ancient cults, rites, and myths, including their parallels with early Christianity, arguably his greatest work, is still rifled by modern mythographers for its detailed information. The first edition, in two volumes, was published in 1890. The third edition was finished in 1915 and ran to twelve volumes, with a supplemental thirteenth volume added in 1936. He also published a single volume abridgement, largely compiled by his wife Lady Frazer, in 1922, with some controversial material removed from the text.[7] The work's influence spilled well over the conventional bounds of academia; the symbolic cycle of life, death and rebirth which Frazer divined behind myths of all pedigrees captivated a whole generation of artists and poets. Perhaps the most notable product of this fascination is T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922). More recently, it was an influence on the ending of Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now (a copy of The Golden Bough figures in one of the final shots). Totem and Exogamy is also cited frequently by Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics.[8]
Frazer's pioneering work[9] has come under criticism by more recent scholars, following a series of critical, even vituperative articles by Edmund Leach, one of which was selected as the lead article in Anthropology Today, vol. 1 (1985);[10] in part Frazer's Golden Bough was criticised for the breadth of comparisons drawn from widely separated cultures, but the criticism is often based on the abridged edition, which omits the supportive archaeological details. In a positive review of a work narrowly focusing 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."[11] Frazer's six volume commentary on the Greek traveler Pausanias' description of Greece in the mid 2nd c. AD remains one of his most important works although archaeological excavations have added enormously to our knowledge of Greece since his time. There is still 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:[12][13]
This type of story is common in Africa. In this story, there are two messages 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.[13]
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.[13]
Because of this, Bantu people such as the Ngoni will punish lizards and chameleons. For example, children may put tobacco into a chameleon's mouth so that the nicotine poisons it and it writhes in multi-coloured death.[13]
Variations of the tale are found in other parts of Africa. For the Akamba, the messengers are the chameleon and the thrush while, for the Ashanti, they are the goat and the sheep.[13]
The Bura people of northern Nigeria say that, at first, neither death nor disease existed but, one day, a man became ill and died. The people sent a worm to ask the sky deity, Hyel, what they should do with him. The worm was told that the people should hang the corpse in the fork of a tree and throw mush at it until it came back to life. But a malicious lizard, Agadzagadza,[14] hurried ahead of the worm and, instead, told them to dig a grave, wrap the corpse in cloth and bury it instead. The people did this so when the worm arrived and said that they should dig up the corpse, place it in a tree, and throw mush at it, they were too lazy to do this and so death remained on Earth.[15][16] This Bura story has the common mythic motif of a vital message which is diverted by a trickster.[17]
In Togoland, the messengers were the dog and the frog, and, as with the Bura, the messengers go first from mankind to God.[13]
The moon regularly seems to disappear and then return. This gave primitive peoples the idea that should or might return from death in a similar way. Stories which 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.[13]
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.[13]
The banana plant bears its fruit on a stalk which then dies. 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. The gift was refused as they did not know what to do with it and so the creator took it back and lowered a banana instead. The couple ate this with relish but the creator then told them that they would live as the banana, perishing after having children rather than remaining everlasting like the stone.[13]