Frazer strikes back from the armchair: a new search for the animist soul~*

摘要

The question which runs throughout this talk can be stated in stark form: is it a mistake to take our interest in an ethnographic phenomenon in the direction of empirical investigation when what is really needed with respect to its clarity is an imaginative contemplation of it? It is my overall argument that the Malinowskian recourse to ethnographical evidence is misguided. As an example, I take the animist conception of 'soul'. I will show how it is essentially an imaginary issue. Rendering it intelligible, therefore, involves launching a speculative investigation into the source of its origin. This finds an echo in Frazer, the last survivor of the old 'armchair school'. His style of anthropology was marked by a deliberate speculative interrogation of cross-cultural ethnography - a process whereby abstract thinking gives force and meaning to ethnographic observations.