> I couldn't tell you how seriously it's taken as a piece of scholarship
> nowadays but it is surely a magnificent source of raw material for the
> creation of fantastic worlds.
Agree completely. I often dip into Sir Jim's opus as a source for ideas and colour. In modern terms however, as a reference to ethnographic data The Golden Bough is almost completely useless. Frazer rarely left his study, and his data came third- or fourth- hand from missionaries, travellers and colonial administrators, rarely if ever from the practitioners themselves. Anthropology had already been transformed by folk like Malinowski and Franz Boas, and Fraser's idealistic, non-empirical armchair anthropology and speculative history was dated even as the book was published. The Golden Bough had a major literary impact, but in anthropology was the last gasp of the nineteenth century universalists.
The trick in reading the Bough is to look beyond the exotica and high strangeness to ask, "real people did this for real, logical reasons. What were those reasons?"
John
nysalor_at_primus.com.au John Hughes
The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe
for human differences.
- - Ruth Benedict.
Powered by hypermail