Critically examine James Frazer's theory of evolutionism. Elucidate the place of religion in modernity

Frazer’s evolutionism

Frazer treated magic as mistaken natural science. By the law of similarity, like produces like. By the law of contact, things once together remain linked. The magician tries to coerce nature. When coercion fails, humans petition personal powers. That is religion. When petition is found wanting, science explains impersonal law. Folk custom survives as a fossil of earlier stages. Comparison was global and ripped from context: a rite in Rome and a rite in a colonial ethnography became one type.

This is intellectualist evolutionism. Belief systems are ranked as proto-theories of nature, by how much they err.

Critique

• Armchair method: Frazer compared library notes, not living economies. Malinowski’s Trobriand magic in fishing and gardening is practical and social. That already wounds Frazer.
• Unilinear stages: Magic, religion and science coexist in every living society, including laboratories with lucky charms. Stages are a Victorian ranking, not a field sequence.
• Too cognitive: Ritual does social work that an error-theory of belief cannot see. Émile Durkheim’s collective effervescence and Turner’s ritual process are the usual counters. E. E. Evans-Pritchard on Azande witchcraft also showed that “irrational” belief can be logically organised in daily life.
• Colonial frame: “Savages” as the childhood of Europe. Later anthropology refused that timeline.
• What survives: The catalogue of sympathetic magic still teaches. The staircase does not.

Religion in modernity

Modernity did not empty the world. Max Weber’s disenchantment was a tendency, not a completed eviction. Secularisation in parts of Europe coexisted with public religion elsewhere, with nationalism as civil religion, with Pentecostal and other revival growth, and with science and piety in the same persons.

• Place: Religion remains a source of identity, ethics, protest and consolation. It also remains a field of power, including gender and majoritarianism.
• Not survivals: A smartphone pilgrimage, online darshan during COVID-19 lockdowns, or a televised Kumbh is not a Frazerian fossil of magic. It is a contemporary institution and a media form.
• Indian household: Clinical medicine and a vow at a shrine often sit in the same family. That coexistence undercuts Frazer’s staircase more cleanly than a sermon about secularism.
• Elucidation: Modernity pluralises the religious field — privatised belief, marketised devotion, political religion — rather than replacing it with Frazer’s science.

• Durkheim and Weber help the modernity argument more than Frazer himself: religion as social fact and as meaning under rationalisation.