The unpublished Frazer Lecture,

I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. When I accepted your invitation to deliver this Frazer Memorial Lecture, I had planned to offer a favourable reassessment of one of Frazer’s most notorious “conjectures, ” but the peculiarities of Frazer’s style make this very difficult. Frazer used his ethnographic evidence, which he culled from here there and everywhere, to illustrate propositions which he had arrived at in advance by a priori reasoning, but, to a degree which is often quite startling, whenever the evidence did not fit he simply altered the evidence! A single example which is relevant for my later presentation will show you what I mean. In volume nine of the twelve-volume third edition of The golden bough, Frazer cites evidence * Publisher’s note: The publication of the 1982 Frazer Lecture by Edmund Leach is part of HAU’s project to unearth previously inedited material of great relevance for the history of ethnographic theory. This unpublished lecture was identified by Giovanni da Col and remained neglected in King’s College Archive in Cambridge. Anastasia Piliavsky kindly offered to act as editor of the original typescript and to contact Leach’s literary executor on behalf of the journal