You would expect a book written in 1890 to have a few idiosyncrasies and other cultural artifacts. But as pointed out by Vishnu, it remains an important scholarly work.stahrwe wrote:Here is what Ron Hogan has to say about Frazer's The Golden Bough on Amazon.com review.
"While highly influential in its day, The Golden Bough has come under harsh critical scrutiny in subsequent decades, with many of its descriptions of regional folklore and legends deemed less than reliable. Furthermore, much of its tone is rooted in a philosophy of social Darwinism--sheer cultural imperialism, really--that finds its most explicit form in Frazer's rhetorical question: "If in the most backward state of human society now known to us we find magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously absent, may we not reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of the world have also at some period of their history passed through a similar intellectual phase?"
I wonder, Stahrwe, why you don't apply some of that hard-fought skepticism to the Bible itself. Indeed, Ron Hogan's (whoever he is) criticisms towards Frazer's The Golden Bough would apply a thousand times over to the Bible which, after all, is very much a product of its time.