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Loading... The illustrated golden boughby James George Frazer
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I was amazed that after buying this classic I had heard about all my life that I really dippied into it and read quite a bit. Good stories. Amazing how many cultures he pulled from with full citations. What I found most interesting was the concept of the soul. Something as a Christian I have problems getting my thoughts clear upon. I will probably get back to it some day in some context. 1   carterchristian1 | Jun 8, 2009 |  The 756-page single volume abridged by Frazer himself , published in 1922, includes a 42-page index with entries that make one long to read the text.  KayCliff | Jan 6, 2009 | Frazer has probably had as much influence on 20th century literature as Freud. As one of the most influential anthropological tomes ever written, I thought this book would hold some interest, even though its thesis (like psychoanalysis) is discredited. Oh, am I ever sorry. The contents are jumbled lists of beliefs and practices of various societies, seemingly cherry-picked to support the centrality of the dying-and-arising god myth in religious practices. (On the positive side, it certainly applies to Christianity.) I'm willing to accommodate the small-mindedness of older authors, but the constant denigration of "savages" just rubs me the wrong way. I suppose I'll use it as reference, but I'm certainly not going to read it through. I'd be happier with a book *about* The Golden Bough. I think the only reason to buy it is as a required text. (  ) IreneF | Sep 30, 2008 | More ideas than you can shake a magic stick at! This work scores a big fat zero for political correctness and it is occasionally infuriating because of its outmoded conclusions, but it reveals a wonderful picture of a lost age of superstition and simple humanity. The thing that struck me was the spectrum of beliefs that human beings are capable of. The ancient ideas that the author tells us of somehow make the rational world we live in today seem almost inhuman. The information is often anecdotal and unsupported, but it's a marvellous read. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the original pool of raw ideas that Man lived by when he first looked about the world and tried to find some meaning, and how that may have led to religion, and ultimately reason. (  )2 tyrone_cowley | Sep 24, 2007 | So this is the condensed version, only about a thousand pages, but still full of fascinating tidbits of folklore and culture, and some very incisive theorizing about human belief patterns and theories of culture to link it all together. Very much a product of its times, but if you can get past the (generally mild) period imperialism, the meat of the book is still good. It's very obviously condensed, though, and therefore I find it best dipped into in small portions. I've no idea how the 12-volume version compares - even the one up in Preject Gutenberg is the condensed edition, as far as I can tell - but I'd like to put down the book's tendency to list a bunch of apparently unrelated facts, then a bald theory, then some more random facts, to the abridging process. Unfortunately it's a style that was picked up by a lot of less rigorous researchers into the liminal spaces (erikvondaniken *cough*), with unfortunate results. But if you're at all interested in magic or folklore or myth or culture, this is a classic, the basis of a lot of fiction and all later theoretical work (even the works that have partially overturned it) and, for all my caveats, still suprisingly readable - a great bedtime book. (  )1 melannen | Jul 26, 2007 |  no reviews | add a review
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While highly influential in its day, The Golden Bough has come under harsh critical scrutiny in subsequent decades, with many of its descriptions of regional folklore and legends deemed less than reliable. Furthermore, much of its tone is rooted in a philosophy of social Darwinism--sheer cultural imperialism, really--that finds its most explicit form in Frazer's rhetorical question: "If in the most backward state of human society now known to us we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of the world have also at some period of their history passed through a similar intellectual phase?" (The truly civilized races, he goes on to say later, though not particularly loudly, are the ones whose minds evolve beyond religious belief to embrace the rational structures of scientific thought.) Frazer was much too genteel to state plainly that "primitive" races believe in magic because they are too stupid and backwards to know any better; instead he remarks that "a savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural." And he certainly was not about to make explicit the logical extension of his theories--"that Christian legend, dogma, and ritual" (to quote Robert Graves's summation of Frazer in The White Goddess) "are the refinement of a great body of primitive and barbarous beliefs." Whatever modern readers have come to think of the book, however, its historical significance and the eloquence with which Frazer attempts to develop what one might call a unifying theory of anthropology cannot be denied. --Ron Hogan
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400)
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