4 - Back to Frazer?

Summary

Opening remarks

Mr. Vice-Chancellor, Ladies and Gentlemen. Like others before me, I feel deeply honoured at having been invited to deliver this lecture. At the same time, for reasons which will shortly become apparent, I start my delivery with apprehensions which I suspect are greater than theirs were.

Although the Frazer lecture is officially defined as a commemoration of a great pioneer in the field of Comparative Religion, the actual practice on many if not most recent occasions has been to damn Frazer with a few faint praises, and then go on as quickly as possible to extol some trend in post-Frazerian thought which repudiates everything he stood for. Even amongst Frazer Lecturers, then, Frazer has been more than anything else a yardstick for showing just how far we have come in the social anthropology of magic and religion in the years since his death.

As one who has been referred to in the profession as a ‘Back-to-Frazer Man’, as a ‘Neo-Frazerian’, and recently, only half in jest, as ‘Frazer Redivivus’, I must confess that this background makes me very uneasy. Are my hosts sadistic post-Frazerians who have invited me with the intention of making cruel sport with a real live Frazerian? Or are they too a little tired of the established pattern, and looking for a break? I only wish I knew! Whatever their motives for inviting me, however, I feel I must do something to live up to my Frazerian reputation.