The Golden Bough: A History of Myth and Religion

James George Frazer was a British social anthropologist, folklorist, and classical scholar who taught for most of his life at Trinity College, Cambridge. Greatly influenced by Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture, published in 1871, he wrote The Golden Bough (1890), a massive reconstruction of the whole of human thought and custom through the successive stages of magic, religion, and science.The Golden Bough is regarded by many today as a much-loved but antiquated relic, but, by making anthropological data and knowledge academically respectable, Frazer made modern comparative anthropology possible.