Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
Sir James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, was the first work in English to understand the religion of classical antiquity in the context of primitive religion. Its dramatic impact on the history of ideas lasted well into the twentieth century, in its association of religious myths with the more primitive forms of ritual and magic generated by the 'savage mind', identified as a common misunderstanding of the scientific laws governing the natural world. This highly acclaimed biography is the first to make a comprehensive study of Frazer's life, the influences on his work, and its wide-ranging implications for modern anthropology, classics, cultural history and folklore. This edition makes Ackerman's fascinating account of Frazer's life available in paperback for the first time. '... the definitive biography ...' -- New Society '... an intellectual history of the age, as elegant as it is comprehensive'. -- The Times 'Ackerman triumphantly succeeds in recreating the mental atmosphere of the late-Victorian world, suspended between religion and science.' -- The Sunday Telegraph '... masterly'. -- The New Republic ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Marriage and family mark the beginning of culture
B. Malinowski's work constitutes an attempt to put anthropology on a scientific footing.
His theory is very simple: anthropology is the study of the institutions, which are organized to satisfy human biological needs. An example: sex as a human need is institutionalized, among other things, by marriage.

The author's list of basic needs and of universal institutional types seems rather arbitrary.
Basic needs: metabolism (food), reproduction (sex), corporeal well being (cleaning), security (cloths), activity (games), growth (of offspring), health (medecine).
Universal institutional types: reproduction (marriage), territory (city), physiology (gender), spontaneous associations (secret clubs), profession (sorcerer), upbringing (learning), health (hospitals).

Anthropology studies also the functions of the different institutions as well as evolutionary aspects (transformations of institutions).
The author makes also a distinction between basic and secondary (derivative) needs, which are economics, social control, education and political organization.
Every culture has its own values, norms, motives and customs.

Malinowski gives everytime a brief description of the different terms he uses.

Althoughmore or less out-of-date, this book is still a worth-while read. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

archane....in more ways than one...perhaps gnostic in several cults
Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (Paperback) by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Another useful book mercifully collected by Rush Rhys (we owe him a lot for his recordings of snatches of Wittgenstein's thoughts). Find these collected in "Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951" and other oddities of Wittgensteinania.

Lots of Philosophy geeks end with Wittgenstein's Tractatus and dismiss his break with his own work in Remarks on Colour and his Blue and Brown books. In other words, Wittgenstein spent the rest of his life refuting his own work and trying to find that ineffable quality in language, particularly in the language of poetic imagination that somehow connects some to the divine.

Enter Wittgenstein's engagement with James George Frazer's Golden Bough, which he returned to again and again. Wittgenstein made a detour into Victorian imagination? Dead-end, or source for reconsideration of the limits of language elucidated in the Tractaus? You decide.

The remarks he makes here do not seem all that insightful to me, and Wittgenstein appears to have bought into the argument that Frazer's theory of the killing of the sacred King was a valid hermeneutic structure, although Wittgenstein's goals were seeking poetics and the force of metaphor. Wittgenstein apparently was unaware that Frazer's work was being dismantled and discredited by serious Anthropologists even in his lifetime, and that the Golden Bough, while a rollicking good novel, was scientifically on the level of phrenology and to anthropology what Erich von Däniken is archaeology.

This book is out of print, but...
all of its contents are available (both in German and English) in the collection of Wittgenstein's writings titled Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951, ... Read more

Book Description
In the first full-length analysis of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, Brian R. Clack presents a fresh and innovative interpretation of Wittgenstein's conception of religion. While previous commentators have tended to sideline the Remarks on Frazer, Clack shows how the key to Wittgenstein's thought on religion lies in these remarks on primitive magico-religious observances. This book shows that Wittgenstein neither embraces expressivism, as it is generally assumed, nor straightforwardly denies instrumentalism. Focusing instead on Wittgenstein's suggestion that magic is somehow akin to metaphysics, a view of ritual as the spontaneous expression of human beings (conceived as "ceremonial animals") is presented. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Let's not get dogmatic, eh!
An elementary familiarity with pre-Christian classical (and other) mythology would show that virtually every attempt to
to de-bunk Frazer's claims, must be seriously flawed. Frazer did not see himself as an 'iconoclast,' he merely wished to point out that archetypally - the Christian'mythos' of the 'god-man' beingsacrificed upon a tree - was not a new event, symbolically, however unique the Christian 'mythos' may be to its followers - it had its antecedents. Taken in a Jungian sense, this need not be seen as a weakening of the Christian mythos, but may even strengthen it, insofar as it confirms the existence of archetypal patterns and determinants in consciousness - transcending dogmatic claims made in the name of any one determinant, just as they transcend rationalistic endeavours to reduce them to a 'nothing but.' Christianity grew out of - and was built upon classical antiquity. It is in many ways determined by it, as for instance, in celebrating the birth of Christ at the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year) symbolically, when light triumphs over darkness - in the life of nature. The true nativity of Jesus was located somewhere in January,and the Church Fathers used their wisdom, shifting it to coincide with the Saturnalia. 'Christmas' time is thoroughly pervaded with 'Pagan' symbolism, (viz. the Yule' celebrations etc.) and it is small minded and a denial of history to claim otherwise. Frazer faked nothing, which had not in a sense, already been 'faked' by the Church, because in their wisdom, the Church Fathers felt obliged to recognise the power of pre-Christian myths. Robert Graves explored the 'tree god' theme all over again with his 'King Jesus.'But anyway, why blow this single aspect of Frazer's work out of proportion. Frazer's discussion of the sacrifice of the 'tree-god' goes alongside countless other myths and myth-motifs.

Why Frazer faked.
Sir James Frazer is sometimes considered a brilliant iconoclast who put Christianity into anthropological perspective, exposing it as one of many dying God and virgin mother legends. In fact his scholarship was seriously flawed. This witty and erudite book is a fascinating piece of detective work, showing how and why Frazer slanted his facts ... Read more