429.3 A centenary appraisal : Sir James George Frazer(1854-1941)'s Golden Bough(1890;12vols 1911-1915)

Friday, August 3, 2012: 9:30 AM
Faculty of Economics, TBA
Oral Presentation
Shoji ISHITSUKA , Information Culture, Tokyo University of Information Sciences, CHIBA, Japan
 Abstract
      A Centenary Appraisal : Sir James George Frazer(1854-1941)'s Golden Bough(1890;12vols 1911-1915)
  We have long seen a variety of discussions around modernization,modernity,postmdernity, and even
postmodernization,etc., finally ,it seems to me,setting upon the globalization-polemics. Western
modernity focuses itself on the following three thematizations, namely, religion, science(& technology),
and capitalism. J.G.Frazer touches upon each of them, in the way that he deals with religion as most
important component of the modern even referring Hegel's Lecture on the Philosophy of Religion(1832)
in his postface to the 1911 edition of The Golden Bough; in the way that he shows a linear evolutionary
process from magic to science, and in the way that he observes the primitive society taking up an
important idea of tabou. In conclusion, I would like to make clear the position of Frazer's Golden Bough
in the history of sociology of religion, and furthermore to make it as subject matter of the origins of
modern sociology in general.