![]() It was a study that he continued for many years, with initial volumes appearing in 1890 and growing in size until the 12-volume edition was published in 1915. Its author, Sir James Frazer, surveyed the wide range of cultural habits, taboos and beliefs in communities across the world concluding that there was an observable pattern in the way magic developed into religion, though formal expression emerged in different ways. In English literature he admired the prose stylists of the eighteenth century and in 1912 he published an edition of the Letters of William Cowper.The Golden Bough, the monumental study of religious rites and practices in ‘primitive’ societies, was one of the earliest influential texts in anthropology. His editions of Pausanias (1898) and of Ovid's Fasti (1929) are permeated with his anthropological insights. In 1936 he added an Aftermath to The Golden Bough and in 19 the contents of his anthropological notebooks were published as Anthologia Anthropologica.Īlways a prodigious and disciplined worker, Frazer also published in the field of classical studies. Other major contributions to his subject were Psyche's Task (1909), Totemism and Exogamy (1910), and Folklore in the Old Testament (1918). He delivered the Gifford lectures at St Andrews on two occasions (1911–12, 1924–25), and these lectures were published as The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead (1913) and The Worship of Nature (1926). Although he retained the Liverpool chair until 1922, Frazer always preferred Cambridge and continued to work there. In 1907 Liverpool University created a chair of social anthropology for Frazer his inaugural lecture was published as The Scope of Social Anthropology (1908). To this end he gathered material from primitive cultures throughout the world, and although his conclusions may be suspect or superseded by more recent research his great compendium of comparative data has never been surpassed. The whole vast structure of The Golden Bough (2 vols, 1890 third and complete edition in 12 vols, 1911–15) grew from Frazer's attempt to explain the ancient office of priest-king of the Arician grove near Lake Nemi in Italy. In 1879 he was elected to a fellowship at Trinity, which he held until his death. He was knighted in 1914 and appointed to the OM in 1925.įrazer was born in Glasgow and took his MA at Glasgow University (1874) before winning a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. ![]() ![]() British anthropologist and classical scholar. ![]()
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