Reading Mix: Ethnographies “The Golden Bough” by James Frazier

Another post, sorry. As mentioned earlier we have writing assignments and this particular assignment ought to have been posted yesterday (we’re supposed to run a non-fiction feature–or features–every Wednesday).

I’m putting my foot in my mouth again and proclaiming this entry to be the first of a *cough* series, which in turn I had been planning to submit for a reading mix challenge in another community. A reading mix is something like a literary playlist, wherein you arrange books less on the basis of a unifying theme and more in terms of how they might read together. Of course, one wonders, who’d be dorky enough to make up a mix about anthropological ethnographies? Ding ding!

Onwards–

The Golden Bough by James Frazier

His work is not–strictly speaking–an ethnography though the form which it takes owes something to the sharp distinction between anthropology as it was ‘done’ by Frazer’s generation (which includes Lubbock and Tylor) and the anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski and his contemporaries. In his writings Frazer tried to establish a closeness between himself and his readers, speaking as though from his armchair, to people who were in a similar position. The succeeding generation of anthropologists spoke as though from the village hut, to people who had never been in a similar position. Malinowski et al wished to bracket off their ethnography as a professionally distinct form of intellectual exercise which, by using their experience of fieldwork as a legitimating device, created simultaneously a distance between themselves and their readers, and a closeness between themselves and the societies they studied.

Nevertheless, Sir James Frazer’s career is a watershed in its own right. He remains today the most famous, and certainly the most successful, of all British anthropologists. His books are still in print and his influence widespread–his ideas have made themselves felt in almost every area of the humanities and the social sciences while, within literature, Conrad, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Synge, Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, Saul Bellow, etc are only a few writers who are indebted to him. Indeed, given his effect on the content, structure and rhetoric of 20th century novels and poems, literary historians have gone so far as to argue that “The Golden Bough” is largely responsible for the form and shape of modern literature. By the 1920s, it has become essential reading for anyone with claims to an education or a critical attitude to life; hundreds wrote to its author thanking them for opening their eyes and changing their lives.

I’m not going to discuss the content or themes or the scholarship of “The Golden Bough” since 1) that would take me ages; 2) I’m assuming that you’ve read it already anyhow. I’m interested here in the reasons behind its success, and what this success implies with regard to popular perceptions of anthropology which persist in one form or another to the present day.

The reasons why anthropology is popular at any particular moment are various and changing. A central factor is people’s perennial curiosity about the ‘exotic,’ a labile, evolving category, which may simultaneously represent the industrialized West both as its hegemonic opposite and as its counter-hegemonic realization, both as an inversion of publicly promoted values and as an example of privately recognized counter-values. The ‘exotic’ is at one and the same time a source of both repulsion and attraction, of both horror and fascination, and properly presented, it sells. The more fluently written of the mid-Victorian anthropological literature on the varieties of kinship and marriage, for instance, attracted such a wide readership partly because their authors’ accounts of ‘primitive promiscuity’, alternative connubial arrangements, and other such matters helped to satisfy the sublimated sensuality of their contemporaries (to put it rather simplistically). Though the ‘exotic’ is historically contingent, some topics seem to have a long-standing allure. Hunters and gatherers in tropical climates have especially intrigued romanticizing Westerners who perceive them as living examples of a primal, authentic humanity now irrevocably lost by the West. Shamanism, with its appeal of wildness and transgression, has long interested those reacting to the hierarchies and institutions of more organized religions.

While the importance of popular interest in the foreign, the wondrous and the strange is not to be underestimated, those anthropologists whose writings have sold particularly well have been above all those who, whether intentionally or not, have been best able to cater to the particular interests of their lay contemporaries. If ‘Where have we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ are queries raised whenever the answers provided by the established faiths seem insufficient, there have usually been some anthropologists ready to formulate new responses, which greatly appeal to large sections of the public.

I think that the key reason for the spectacular success of Frazer was that he had both an encyclopaedic grasp of ethnographic data and an eclectic disposition towards contemporary intellectual fashions. A great synthesizer, in other words–bringing J.S. Mill’s rationalism, Matthew Arnold’s historicism, and T.H. Huxyley’s evolutionary and scientific outlook right up to par with classical and other mythologies. By exploring the interrelated ways of the ‘Ancients,’ rural Europeans and tribal peoples, he simultaneously civilized the savage and subtly savaged the supposedly civilized. At a time when the unchecked forces of industrialization and imperialism were violently changing the nature of British society and its place of the world, at a time when people’s conceptions of the rural and the urban, the past and the present, the indigenous and the foreign, the religious and the secular, were all undergoing radical revision, Frazer’s works proposed a learned and readable response to the questions people posed and to the doubts they harbored. Instead of relying on the old verities, he proffered a cultured agnosticism as the only appropriate attitude to adopt in his time. Just as possession of the Golden Bough had enabled Virgil’s Aeneas to enter the underworld and return, so could Frazer’s book act as a vade-mecum for those who wished to explore the Other, so to speak, and learn from the experience.

(There’s also his language, of course. “The Golden Bough” is an erudite work, but Frazer was able to convey his views without resorting to technical jargon and obscure expression. He favored an elegiac mode of writing, one sprung with biblical and Latinate rhythms, which he then leavened with irony, humor and an artful use of imagery. Frazer, in other words, was not trying to batter his readers with bald logic, but to persuade them with the appeal of his rhetoric. As the record of his sales shows, if he did not always manage to win over his enormous audience, at the very least they were prepared to read his words.)