J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work

Robert Ackerman's J. G. Frazer, His Life and Work, published by Cambridge University Press in 1987, is the standard scholarly biography of the anthropologist James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, and it documents in detail both the wide influence Frazer's comparative method once had and its later rejection by the fieldwork based generation of anthropologists who followed him. Its authority rests on standard academic peer review at a major university press and Ackerman's thorough archival biographical research. Its strength for this atlas is exactly that even handed treatment of both Frazer's historical importance and the specific methodological grounds on which later anthropology moved away from his comparative armchair method, which lets a reader understand both why Frazer mattered and why his conclusions are no longer taken as reliable without independent fieldwork evidence.