Frazer, James (George) (1854–1941)

Scottish anthropologist. Frazer's book The Golden Bough (12 volumes, 1890–1915), a pioneer study of the origins of religion and sociology on a comparative basis, exerted considerable influence on subsequent anthropologists and writers such as T S Eliot and D H Lawrence. By the standards of modern anthropology, many of its methods and findings are unsound.

Frazer became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1876. He was knighted in 1914, and awarded the Order of Merit in 1925.

Frazer was born in Glasgow and educated at the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge. Initially he studied the classics but branched into ethnology with a book on totemism (1887). Chiefly interested in the origin of religion, which he believed developed out of an early belief in magic, and arose when people conceived of nature as a personal force to be propitiated by sacrifice, Frazer postulated a third stage, when they controlled nature by scientific action. He was later criticized for not observing at first hand the practices he described, and for taking them out of context.

His works include Totemism and Exogamy (1911), Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship (1905), Adonis, Attis, Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion (1906), Folk-lore in the Old Testament (1918), Myths of the Origin of Fire (1930), and The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion (1936).