Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) caught the popular imagination with his vast and enterprising comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, which in its third edition numbered 12 volumes. Reissued here is Frazer's own single-volume abridgement of 1922.[...]
"We have, at long last, a real historian with real historical skills and no intra-professional ax to grind. . . . All these pieces show the virtues one finds missing in . . . nearly all of anthropological history work but [Stocking's]: extensive and critical use of archival sources, tracing of real [...]
"The Ethnographer's Magic" may be read at several levels by practitioners from several disciplines: intellectual history, history of science, anthropology, even comparative literature, new cultural history, and literary criticism. Original in its design, it presents the historiographer as composer, [...]