Critically examine James Frazer’s theory of evolutionism. Elucidate the place of religion in modernity. (Answer in 250 words)

- Critically examine James Frazer’s theory of evolutionism. Elucidate the place of religion in modernity. (Answer in 250 words)
Introduction
Frazer's evolutionism is intellectualist: he treated magic, religion and science as three successive answers to the same question about how the world works, the earlier two being mistakes.

Body
1. The theory: in The Golden Bough (1890-1915) humanity passes from magic through religion to science. Magic is a false applied science resting on sympathetic principles — homoeopathic magic on the law of similarity, contagious magic on the law of contact. When magic visibly fails, men postulate personal powers to be propitiated, and religion begins; science then supplies the correct laws. The priest-king of Nemi, the dying and reviving god and the scapegoat are his organising themes.
2. The criticisms: the comparative method assembles customs stripped from context, which Boas attacked as early as 1896. Frazer was an armchair scholar dependent on missionary and traveller reports. Malinowski's Trobriand fishermen refuted the sequence directly — they use magic for the dangerous open sea and not for the safe lagoon, so magic supplements technique rather than preceding it. Evans-Pritchard showed Azande witchcraft to be internally coherent, and Wittgenstein objected that ritual is expressive, not bad causal reasoning.
3. The verdict: the stages are indefensible and the psychology ethnocentric, but his categories and his vast collection kept comparative religion alive and fed Turner and Levi-Strauss.
4. Religion in modernity: the secularisation thesis has been substantially retracted, Berger himself abandoning it. Religion has been privatised in parts of Europe but deprivatised elsewhere, as Casanova argues — Pentecostal expansion, religious nationalism including Hindutva, godmen and new spiritualities, and digital and diasporic worship.

Conclusion
Frazer's own prediction is the clearest evidence against his scheme: science advanced and religion did not retreat before it. Magic, religion and science coexist as different modes of engagement, not as stages.