A Long Awaited Book

I had been waiting for two weeks for a book to arrive. I'd read that it might take up to twelve business days, so I was slightly annoyed when I got an email thirteen days out that the book was getting ready to ship.

Waiting turned into a game I would play with the dog: whenever she would bark at the door and try to inhale any air diffusing in from underneath the door (because wicked monsters are obviously advancing upon the house with dirty work in mind), I would say, "What? Is it my book? Are you telling me my book is here?"

When I came home from work a few days later and there was a package leaning against the door, I shrieked, ”It’s here! It’s here!” Then I had to let the dog sniff the package so she would know that there were no dog toys in it.

Gleefully anticipating the revelations of poetical back-projection onto the historical and archeological records, and the wholesale fabrication of ancient spiritual practices, I placed the spine of "A Century of James Frazer's The Golden Bough: Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough" flat on the table and went through the process of folding the first and last pages against the inside covers until I had reached the center of the book.

Then I sat down with tea, pen, and Post-it Notes to enjoy and annotate the book, which is a collection of essays from a symposium on the impact of The Golden Bough on folklore, comparative religion, and anthropology. The main question of the book is, "If Frazer's The Golden Bough is so flawed, why are academics in the humanities still using its methodologies?"  

So far I'm only fifty pages in, and the arguments are, 1) not everything in the Golden Bough is wrong, 2) there are some universal human social structures, 3) if we look at it as a work of historical fiction, it presents some useful and inspiring metaphors, and 4) the massive ethnological record Frazer and his predecessors was a work that should be reassessed, but not ignored.  

I think my favorite part so far was the part in Ronald Hutton's essay, wherein he pointed out that Frazer wanted to turn people off of the folly of religion (both Christianity and its perceived Pagan roots), but, ironically, Frazer wrote so luridly of the sex and violence in the prehistoric and savage rites that his readers were entertained and titillated by it.

How I laughed and laughed as I wrote the Post-It note annotating that entry—Oh Horror! I've just discovered that Post-It Notes are not that great for books!  (Looks in dismay at shelves of annotated books in his research library.)