The Golden Bough

Sir James George Frazer is widely considered the father of anthropology, and a lot of that is due to his most famous work, The Golden Bough, which looked at how different societies across the globe formed similar belief systems based off beliefs in magic, religion and/or science. The Golden Bough looks at the parallels of certain groups' rituals and religious beliefs, thus comparing two seemingly different systems and pointing out their similarities. As a result, The Golden Bough remains not only popular but controversial and a hot topic of debate even today.