and others whose work stemmed from nineteenth-century evolutionary
traditions of enquiry. Frazer sought generalizations about huge data sets
on myths and rituals around the world that led him to identify themes
such as‘the dying god’, seasonal rituals, and the structuring of time, the
significance of fire in general, and bonfires, scapegoats, and the like,
themes often rooted in European folklore but resonating also with new
ethnographic materials from Australia and the Pacific and with ancient
texts from Greece and Rome. Radcliffe-Brown would also occasionally
draw on materials of this kind, for example, to illustrate a point about the
operation of taboos in society.
In examining Australian Aboriginal societies he was interested in estab-
lishing a model of the importance of patrilineal descent in the formation of
local groups, and he made some personalfield expeditions in pursuit of
this theme while he was Professor of Anthropology at the University
of Sydney in Australia. Malinowski displays his greater interest in‘culture’
in his early work examining the issue of whether Australian Aborigines
‘recognized’the role of physiological male procreation: an interest which
would draw him somewhat closer to Frazer’s work on customary notions
than Radcliffe-Brown’s concentration on‘structure’. A moment’s further
consideration, however, reveals to us that these two respective foci should
have been seen as interrelated, if‘patriliny’and‘paternity’are to be in any
way connected. Incidentally, scholarship has since moved on. Local
groups in Australian Aboriginal society were not necessarily patrilineal
(see, e.g., Hiatt 1996 ); and ideas of physiological procreation were also
present, co-existing with other components of defining paternity in terms
of locality and the landscape and the agency of spirit entities.
Finally, on this theme, Robert Ackerman’s detailed study ofFrazer’s
Life and Work(Ackerman 1987 ) makes it clear that Frazer and Malinowski
stayed closely in touch over a long period of time and that Malinowski
attributed to Frazer’s writings some influence over his own thinking, for
example, on the topic of magic and religion and their connection with
economic life. This example indicates the complexity of relationships
between practitioners infields of enquiry. Malinowski’s detailedfieldwork
made possible a deeper understanding of magic as what we would now call
performance, with a concentration on context and practice rather than
simply on mental constructs of contiguity and resemblance (items once in
contact remain in contact and like influences like).
When Frazer appealed to mental associations of this kind as the foun-
dations of magical thinking, he was perhaps following a Cartesian-based
1 FRAMING HISTORY 3