James George Frazer

James George Frazer (1854–1941) was a Scottish classicist and anthropologist, born in Glasgow and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, for more than sixty years. He never did fieldwork; working from books and from questionnaires sent to missionaries and colonial officials, he assembled the comparative study of magic, religion and custom that became The Golden Bough, published in two volumes in 1890 and in twelve by 1915, with his own abridgment in 1922. Totemism and Exogamy, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament and The Belief in Immortality followed. Knighted in 1914 and blind in his last years, he influenced Freud, Eliot and Joyce more than he influenced later anthropologists.