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Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist (1854–1941)

Sir James George Frazer influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion.

Frazer was born on 1 January 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of Katherine Brown and Daniel F. Frazer, a chemist. He attended school at Springfield Academy and Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh. He studied at the University of Glasgow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honours in classics (his dissertation was published years later as The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory) and remained a Classics Fellow all his life. From Trinity, he went on to study law at the Middle Temple, but never practised. Four times elected to Trinity's Title Alpha Fellowship, he was associated with the college for most of his life, except for the year 1907–1908, spent at the University of Liverpool. He was knighted in 1914, and a public lectureship in social anthropology at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow and Liverpool was established in his honour in 1921. He was, if not blind, then severely visually impaired from 1930 on. He and his wife, Lilly, died in Cambridge, England, within a few hours of each other. She would later adapt Frazer's Golden Bough as a book of children's stories, The Leaves from the Golden Bough. His sister Isabella Katherine Frazer married the mathematician John Steggall.

The study of myth and religion became his areas of expertise. Except for visits to Italy and Greece, Frazer was not widely travelled. His prime sources of data were ancient histories and questionnaires mailed to missionaries and imperial officials all over the globe. Frazer's interest in social anthropology was aroused by reading E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and was also encouraged by his friend, the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, who was comparing elements of the Old Testament with early Hebrew folklore. Frazer was the first scholar to describe in detail the relations between myths and rituals. His vision of the annual sacrifice of the Year King has not been borne out by field studies. Yet The Golden Bough, his study of ancient cults, rites, and myths, including their parallels in early Christianity, continued for many decades to be studied by modern mythographers for its detailed information. The first edition, in two volumes, was published in 1890; and a second, in three volumes, in 1900. The third edition was finished in 1915 and ran to twelve volumes, with a supplemental thirteenth volume added in 1936. He published a single volume abridged version, largely compiled by his wife Lady Frazer, in 1922, with some controversial material on Christianity excluded from the text. The work's influence extended well beyond the conventional bounds of academia, inspiring the new work of psychologists and psychiatrists. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, cited Totemism and Exogamy frequently in his own Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. The symbolic cycle of life, death and rebirth which Frazer divined behind myths of many peoples captivated a generation of artists and poets. Perhaps the most notable product of this fascination is T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922). Frazer's pioneering work has been criticised by late 20th century scholars. For instance, in the 1980s the social anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote a series of critical articles, one of which was featured as the lead in Anthropology Today, vol. 1 (1985). Leach criticised The Golden Bough for the breadth of comparisons drawn from widely separated cultures, but often based his comments on the abridged edition, which omits the supportive archaeological details. In a positive review of a book narrowly focused on the cultus in the Hittite city of Nerik, J. D. Hawkins remarked approvingly in 1973, "The whole work is very methodical and sticks closely to the fully quoted documentary evidence in a way that would have been unfamiliar to the late Sir James Frazer." More recently, The Golden Bough has been criticised for what are widely perceived as imperialist, anti Catholic, classist and racist elements, including Frazer's assumptions that European peasants, Aboriginal Australians and Africans represented fossilised, earlier stages of cultural evolution. Another important work by Frazer is his six volume commentary on the Greek traveller Pausanias' description of Greece in the mid 2nd century AD. Since his time, archaeological excavations have added enormously to the knowledge of ancient Greece, but scholars still find much of value in his detailed historical and topographical discussions of different sites, and his eyewitness accounts of Greece at the end of the 19th century.

Among the most influential elements of the third edition of The Golden Bough is Frazer's theory of cultural evolution and the place Frazer assigns religion and magic in that theory. Frazer's theory of cultural evolution was not absolute and could reverse, but sought to broadly describe three (or possibly, four) spheres through which cultures were thought to pass over time. Frazer believed that, over time, culture passed through three stages, moving from magic, to religion, to science. Frazer's classification notably diverged from earlier anthropological descriptions of cultural evolution, including that of Auguste Comte, because he thought magic was both initially separate from religion and invariably preceded religion. He also defined magic separately from belief in the supernatural and superstition, presenting an ultimately ambivalent view of its place in culture. Frazer believed that magic and science were similar because both shared an emphasis on experimentation and practicality; his emphasis on this relationship is so broad that almost any disproven scientific hypothesis technically constitutes magic under his system. In contrast to both magic and science, Frazer defined religion in terms of belief in personal, supernatural forces and attempts to appease them. As historian of religion Jason Josephson Storm describes Frazer's views, Frazer saw religion as "a momentary aberration in the grand trajectory of human thought." He thus ultimately proposed – and attempted to further – a narrative of secularization and one of the first social scientific expressions of a disenchantment narrative. At the same time, Frazer was aware that both magic and religion could persist or return. He noted that magic sometimes returned so as to become science, such as when alchemy underwent a revival in Early Modern Europe and became chemistry. On the other hand, Frazer displayed a deep anxiety about the potential of widespread belief in magic to empower the masses, indicating fears of and biases against lower class people in his thought.