FRAZER, JAMES GEORGE. - Ethnologist who may be regarded as the epigone of evolutionary ethnology, represented in England by E. B. Tylor. He was born in Glasgow on 1 Jan. 1854, and died in Cambridge on 9 May 1941. A lawyer by profession, he devoted himself entirely to ethnological studies, around which he assembled an exceedingly abundant body of material, which he arranged according to certain general schemes concerning beliefs and practices found among present-day primitive populations and persisting as survivals in the folklore of modern civilized peoples; he also applied these criteria of investigation to the cultured peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world: Greeks, Romans, Hebrews.
His great merit was to offer scholars the extensive body of facts mentioned above, critically examined in ancient sources and in modern accounts, always scrupulously cited; his error was 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 recognized the ineffectiveness 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 tendencies, can never satisfy those aspirations or meet those needs for which religion provides, since they rest upon another plane.
His most voluminous work, which in its third edition incorporates seven treatises previously conceived as separate works, bears the general title The golden Bough (The Golden Bough, 1st ed., London 1890; 3rd ed., ibid. 1911-12, Italian trans., 2 vols., Turin 1950); the treatises are distributed as follows: I. The magic art and the evolution of Kings (2 vols., ibid. 1911), which studies the magical origin of royal power, taking as its starting-point the law of succession to the ancient Nemorensian priesthood; II. Taboo and the perils of the soul (1 vol., ibid. 1911), on the various prohibitions, dangerous to disregard or violate, concerning persons, objects, and actions in which the individual may become entangled; III. The dying God (1 vol., ibid. 1911), on the sacrifice of divine beings, animal, vegetable, or human; IV. Adonis, Artis, Osiris (2 vols., ibid. 1914), on the dying and rising deities characteristic of mystery religions; V. Spirits of the corn and of the wild (2 vols., ibid. 1912), on the spirits of vegetation and the rites of May and of the harvest; VI. The scapegoat (1 vol., ibid. 1913), on the scapegoat of the Hebrew ritual and related rites directed toward the expiation of sins; VII. Balder the beautiful (2 vols., ibid. 1913), on fire rites in connection with the beautiful god of Norse saga, slain and then burned at sea upon his ship. In all, 1 vol. plus one of Bibliography and general index (ibid. 1915). Frazer also published an abridgment of this work (London 1932), translated into Italian by L. De Bosis (3 vols., Rome 1925).
Other important works by F. are: Totemism and exogamy (4 vols., London 1910); The belief in immortality and the worship of the dead (3 vols., ibid. 1913-24); Pessanians' description of Greece (translation and commentary, 2nd ed., 6 vols., ibid. 1922); Folklore in the Old Testament (3 vols., ibid. 1913; abridgment, 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 the British Academy, and was granted a title of nobility in 1914. In his honour, the “Fraser Memorial Lectureship” was established for lectures on ethnographical questions at various universities.
In order to make such a vast body of material 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 works already published; Anthologia anthropologica (3 vols., ibid. 1938-1939), a valuable collection of material, still to be elaborated, drawn from more than fifty notebooks of manuscript notes.