Abstract:
This project investigates Frazer’s influence within both the academic study of religion and new religious movements, such as contemporary Paganism and New Age, with focus on his deployment of religion to code cultural difference and race. My paper draws on interconnecting hierarchies of class, geography, culture, and religion to create mutually reinforcing signifiers of alien others. Difference in one category is understood as both cause and symptom of difference in the others. Thus religious difference, in and of itself, can serve as both sign of and cypher for racial difference, while also obfuscating racial anxieties under the cover of theological disagreement or cultural critique. As the academic study of religion continues to reckon with its entanglements with colonial white supremacy, and as new religious movements struggle with traditions of cultural appropriation, Frazer offers a stark example of a self-identified scientific and descriptive project that is clearly not. The point is not that Frazer is an aberration or a failure, but that he has done us the favor of throwing into relief racial dynamics across the academic study of religion more broadly.
Additional Authors: Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough: Frazer's Golden Bough at 100 (Conference); Tully, Caroline Jane; Budin, Stephanie Lynn; University of Melbourne;
