Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) and his monumental "The Golden Bough" (1890-1915) occupies an important place in the historiography of British folklore studies. I have used the twelve volume set as a source book for references to and descriptions of tens of thousands of sometimes-obscure sources. Others have used him to support their own conception folklore as a Neolithic inheritance as well as to support other outdates ideas.
For example, I take apart Frazer's idea of "corn Spirits" in harvest rituals in my book (currently under review), "The Folklore of Cornwall" (this language appeared in an earlier form in my article, Ronald M. James, “Cornish Folklore: Context and Opportunity,” Cornish Studies 18, ed. by Philip Payton (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter, 2011)):
The pioneering Scottish anthropologist James Frazer (1854-1941) incorporated the practice of crying the neck and its other British counterparts into his larger discussion about a figure he called the corn mother. For Frazer, practices such as these echoed imagined Neolithic rituals that involved sacrifices to ensure the bounty of the harvest. Thomas subsequently took up the motif in his treatment of Cornish folklore, embracing Frazer’s conclusion that the folk memory of ancient sacrifices surfaced in recorded Cornish folkways.
Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud in A Dictionary of English Folklore cite the existence of numerous harvest effigies from various places in Britain, and they provide an eloquent critique of Frazer: ‘For nearly a century, the study of harvest customs has been stultified by the tacit acceptance of J. G. Frazer’s theories about “corn spirits”. Few folklorists have bothered to analyse this material as they all assume that the origin and background has already been demonstrated. Frazer’s ideas have long been discredited…, but we still need to move on to a post-Frazer era.’
I then proceed to offer other ways to understand these harvest rituals. But that's only an indirect way to answer your question.
The point here is that Frazer's ideas are terribly outdated. They belong to a nineteenth-century generation of imaginings that connected information gathered by the earlier collectors with a prehistory that was romantically - not accurately - conceived. While Frazer provides a useful reference book, his ideas are outdated if not troublesome. I can't imagine slogging through his tens of thousands of examples and being able to absorb all that in any productive, practical way, and I wouldn't want to waste my time being influenced (if I were a beginning scholar) by someone who is a curiosity in the development folklore theory, but who is no longer taken seriously.
As a point of context, Frazer's ideas were better expressed by Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831-1880) who was taken apart by many subsequent folklorists. The controversy - and a better place to understand Frazer and this period of folklore studies - is the late Alan Dundes, "International Folkloristics: Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore " (1999).
I hope it's okay if I ask a follow-up question (and I've already read previous posts on the subject of Golden Bough/Frazer). I'm a complete layman as far as anthropology is concerned, and when I read the Golden Bough, I was excited by Frazer's idea that many superstitions or seemingly meaningless village traditions could be hypothetically traced back to ancient magic rituals or religious practices (by analogy). Has this conclusion been disproved by more contemporary scientists?