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James George FrazerThe Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1890A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Sir James George Frazer and His Influences
James George Frazer (born Glasgow 1854, died Cambridge 1941) was an influential social anthropologist and folklorist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He studied classics at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, and spent most of his academic career as a Classics Fellow at Trinity. His wife, Lily Grove; his university mentors and colleagues; field researchers and missionaries; and the thinkers of his day all influenced his development of comparative religious studies and aided in his creation of The Golden Bough.
In 1896, he married French-born British writer and translator Elizabeth “Lily” Grove. Her efforts considerably raised Frazer’s esteem among contemporary critics and scholars. She became Frazer’s editor, promoting his scholarship, which she abridged, translated into French, and adapted for children.
Frazer’s university mentors, including the classicist W. H. Rouse, influenced him by encouraging him to explore the nascent field of anthropology and its relationship to myth and religion, a comparative approach that had not yet been considered. The founder of cultural anthropology, E. B. Tylor, also influenced Frazer, and Tylor’s work on animism (the belief that all objects and beings have a spiritual nature) and the evolution of modern religious thought became the foundation for Frazer’s own comparative work. A student of Greek and Latin literature, Frazer had a vast knowledge of ancient myths and religious texts of this period, which he draws on heavily in The Golden Bough.
Frazer had traveled to Italy and Greece but did not have first-hand experience of the other cultures mentioned in his text. For this information, he drew on a combination of ancient histories, anthropological field notes, and the writings of colonial envoys and missionaries. This wide-ranging source material provided Frazer with more information than a single researcher could gather and allowed him to test his theory of finding the same ritual concepts in different societies.
British biologist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) particularly influenced Frazer with his work On the Origin of Species (1859). Frazer translated the concept of evolutionary biology into the idea of cultural and social evolution, giving him a framework within which to propose his argument about how cultures and religions die out or develop over time.
Critical Context: The Golden Bough and Its Legacy
The first edition of The Golden Bough was published in two volumes in 1890. The second extended to a third volume and came out in 1900. The third edition, published in 1915, ran to 12 volumes, to which a supplementary volume was added in 1936. Lily Frazer is widely believed to have been responsible for a single-volume abridged version in 1922, from which the more controversial elements of the text from a Christian perspective had been expunged.
The Golden Bough greatly influenced Freud, especially in his 1913 volume Totem and Taboo. Frazer’s influence can also be traced in Jung’s theories of archetypes and the collective unconscious. American poet T. S. Eliot cited Frazer’s work as a source for The Wasteland (1922), and Irish writer James Joyce drew on Frazer’s ideas in his masterwork Ulysses (1922). Frazer’s work likely influenced the motifs of comparative religion and mythology that pervade Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s oeuvre.
The Golden Bough remains a foundational work in the fields of cultural anthropology and comparative religious studies, but modern criticism focuses on the cultural biases and lack of empirical evidence that pervade Frazer’s work. For instance, Frazer has been criticized for speculating on the meaning of Indigenous customs and rituals and of selecting examples from various cultures to fit in with his pre-formulated theories, ignoring counterexamples that could complicate his argument.
While Frazer’s wide range of source material provided him with a wealth of information, much of it consisted of second-hand testimonies of white colonial missionaries that were both culturally biased and impossible to verify. For this reason, Frazer’s interpretation of cultures he deems “primitive” has been accused of Eurocentrism, seeking to fit vastly disparate cultures and religions into a framework based on Judeo-Christian archetypes and the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome. His 19th-century vision of “progress,” which presents the Indigenous peoples of Britain’s Indian and African colonies as less evolved than their European counterparts, is now considered outdated and offensive. In modern scholarship, The Golden Bough is read in the context of its era, rather than as an empirical text.
