FRAZER, JAMES GEORGE. - An ethnologist who may be considered the last exponent of evolutionary ethnology, as represented in England by E. B. Tylor. He was born in Glasgow on 1 January 1854 and died in Cambridge on 9 May 1941. A lawyer by profession, he devoted himself entirely to ethnological studies, gathering an enormous body of material which he organized according to certain general schemes relating to beliefs and practices found among contemporary primitive peoples and persisting as survivals in the folklore of modern civilized peoples; he applied these same criteria of investigation also to the cultured peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world: Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews.
His great merit lies in having provided scholars with a vast array of facts, as mentioned above, carefully evaluated from ancient sources and scrupulously cited from modern scholarship; his error lies in having posited magic as the first rung in humanity’s ascent, first toward religion and then toward science: religion would have arisen after man recognized the inefficacy of magical practices; science would tend to replace religion once the non-existence of supernatural powers had been established. Both theses are erroneous because magic and religion are two autonomous and coeval positions of the human spirit, whereas science, with all its discoveries and techniques, can never satisfy those aspirations and needs to which religion responds, as they are grounded in a different plane.
His most voluminous work, which resulted from the incorporation in its third edition of seven treatises previously conceived as separate works, bears the general title The Golden Bough (Il ramo d'oro, 1st ed., London 1969; 3rd ed., 1971–75; Italian trans., 2 vols., Turin 1950). The treatises are distributed as follows: I. The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (2 vols., 1971), which studies the magical origin of royal power, taking as its starting point the legend of the succession of the ancient priesthood of Memphite origin; II. Taboo and the Perils of the Soul (1 vol., 1971), on the various interrelations—dangerous to ignore or violate—concerning persons, objects, and actions in which the individual may become entangled; III. The Dying God (1 vol., 1971), on the sacrifice of divine beings, whether animal, vegetable, or human; IV. Adonis, Attis, Osiris (2 vols., 1971–74), on the dying-and-rising deities characteristic of the mystery cults; V. Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild (2 vols., 1971–72), on the spirits of vegetation, the rites of May and of the harvest; VI. The Scapegoat (1 vol., 1971–73), on the ritual scapegoat of Hebrew tradition and related rites directed toward the expiation of guilt; VII. Balder the Beautiful (2 vols., 1971–72), on the fire rites associated with the beautiful god of the Norwegian festival, slain and then burned at sea upon his ship. In all, there are 12 volumes plus one of Bibliography and General Index (1971–75). Frazer also published a commentary on this work (London 1932), translated into Italian by L. De Bossi (3 vols., Rome 1925).
Other important works by Frazer include: Totemism and Exogamy (4 vols., London 1910); The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead (3 vols., 1971–74); Pausanias’ Description of Greece (translation and commentary, 2nd ed., 6 vols., 1971–72); Folklore in the Old Testament (3 vols., 1971–72; abridged ed., 1922); Apollodorus, The Library (1 vol., 1971–72); The Fasti of Ovid (5 vols., 1971–72).
He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, an honorary doctor of various universities, a member of the Royal Society and of the British Academy, and was knighted in 1914. In his honor, the "Frazer Memorial Lectureship" was established to fund lectures on ethnographic topics at various universities.
To make such a vast body of material more accessible to scholars and the public, two anthologies were compiled from his writings: Man, God and Immortality (1 vol., London 1927), theoretical in content and drawn from his previously published works; and Anthology of Anthropology (3 vols., 1971–73), a valuable collection of material to be elaborated, drawn from more than fifty notebooks of manuscript notes.