FRAZER, JAMES GEORGE. - Ethnologist who can be considered the epigone of evolutionary ethnology, represented in England by E. B. Tylor. He was b. in Glasgow on 1 Jan. 1854, and d. in Cambridge on 9 May 1941. He was a lawyer by profession, but devoted himself entirely to ethnological studies, around which he gathered a very copious body of material, which he arranged according to certain general schemata relating to beliefs and practices found among present-day primitive peoples and surviving as survivals in the folklore of modern civilized peoples; he applied these criteria of inquiry also to the cultured peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world: Greeks, Romans, Jews.
His great merit is to have offered scholars the broad abundance of facts mentioned above, sifted in the ancient sources and in modern accounts always scrupulously cited; his fault is to have placed magic as the first step in humanity's ascent, first toward religion and then toward science: religion would have arisen after man had ascertained the ineffectiveness of magical practices; science would tend to replace religion once the non-existence of supernatural powers had been ascertained. Both theses are erroneous because magic and religion are two autonomous and coeval positions of the human spirit, while science, with all its discoveries and its tendencies, can never satisfy those aspirations nor meet those needs which religion provides for, and which rest upon another plane.
His most voluminous work, which in its third edition results from the incorporation of seven treatises originally conceived as separate works, bears as its general title The golden Bough (The Golden Bough, 1st ed., London 1890; 3rd ed., ibid. 1911-12, trans. 1, 2 vols., Turin 1950); the treatises are distributed therein as follows: I. The magic art and the evolution of Kings (2 vols., ibid. 1911), which studies the magical origin of royal power, taking its cue from the law of succession of the ancient priesthood of Nemi; II. Taboo and the perils of the soul (1 vol., ibid. 1911); on the various interdictions, dangerous to ignore and to violate, concerning persons, objects, actions in which the individual may find himself entangled; III. The dying God (1 vol., ibid. 1911), on the sacrifice of divine beings, animal, vegetable or human; IV. Adonis, Attis, Osiris (2 vols., ibid. 1914), on the divinities that die and rise again, proper to the mystery religions; V. Spirits of the corn and of the wild (2 vols., ibid. 1912); on the spirits of vegetation, the rites of May and of the harvest; VI. The scapegoat (1 vol., ibid. 1913), on the scapegoat of Hebrew ritual and related rites directed to the expiation of sins; VII. Balder the beautiful (2 vols., ibid. 1913), on the fire rites in connection with the beautiful god of the Norse saga, killed, and then burned at sea on his ship. In all, 1 vol. more plus one of Bibliography and general index (ibid. 1915). Of this work F. also published a compendium (London 1932), translated into Italian by L. De Bosis (3 vols., Rome 1925).
Other important works of F. are: Totemism and exogamy (4 vols., London 1910); The belief in immortality and the worship of the dead (3 vols., ibid. 1913-24); Pausanias' description of Greece (trans. and commentary, 2nd ed., 6 vols., ibid. 1922); Folklore in the Old Testament (3 vols., ibid. 1913; compendium, ibid. 1922); Apollodorus, the library (1 vol., ibid. 1921); The Fasti of Ovid (5 vols., ibid. 1929).
He was a «fellow» of Trinity College, Cambridge, honorary doctor of various universities, member of the Royal Society and of the British Academy, decorated with a title of nobility in 1914. In his honor the «Fraser Memorial Lectureship» was founded for lectures on questions of ethnography at various universities.
To make a body of material so vast more accessible to the scholarly public, two anthologies were compiled from his writings: Man, God and immortality (1 vol., London 1927); of theoretical content, drawn from the works already printed: Anthologia anthropologica (3 vols., ibid. 1938-1939), a valuable collection of material, to be elaborated, drawn from more than fifty notebooks of manuscript notes.