The Golden Bount and the Origins of Contagious Magic

i think one common criticism is that fraser would sometimes, i think, kind of fudge or cherry pick the ethnographic evidence he cited in order to make things fit more cleanly into his broader theories. So while the golden bough remains a fascinating reed, i would advocate that you shouldn't rely on fraser alone as your sole source for anything. Lincoln also mentions the work of an anthropologist named mary douglas, who is a very influential twentieth century anthropologist. She proposed that within human religious thinking, that the body is a powerful model which can represent any bounded system and which most often represents society itself.