Passage Ironically, One of the Most Influential Works of Anthropology Ever

Passage
Ironically, one of the most influential works of anthropology ever written was destined to have a more enduring impact outside this field.  An instantaneous bestseller when it appeared in 1890, Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion was considered controversial for its treatment of many religions as fertility cults centered on a cycle of death and rebirth.  While the book's overwhelming popularity assured its place in posterity, the changing face of science and the further emergence of anthropology as a discipline meant it would be as reviled as it was revered.  At worst it was dismissed as a relic, an egregious example of "armchair" anthropology and an encyclopedic monstrosity; at best it was exalted as a dazzling display of erudition packaged in poetic prose and enjoyed as a rare example of adventure tale, travelogue, and detective story all rolled into one.First published in two volumes, by 1915 Frazer's vast compendium of myth and ritual had filled twelve.  The work emphasized the striking similarities in myths across cultures and time periods-a comparativist or universalist view that Frazer did not invent but employed lavishly, piling example upon example.  The Golden Bough proved an intellectual and stylistic phenomenon with an ever-expanding influence on the cultural milieu.  Those pulled into the Frazerian vortex included pioneering psychologists Freud and Jung as well as many of the most creative writers of the early 20th century, such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad.  It is perhaps no coincidence that the first one-volume abridgement of The Golden Bough was published in 1922-the same year in which Eliot's unorthodox poem The Waste Land and Joyce's experimental novel Ulysses appeared in print.The year 1922 also saw the publication of Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders-groundbreaking anthropological works that departed radically in method and style from Frazer's grand exercise in mythography and ethnography.  In an approach termed "functionalist," Malinowski, who had described himself as "enslaved" by Frazer's text as a youngster, began incorporating fieldwork into the discipline and examining how mythic practices contributed to the overall stability of a society.  Later, Claude Lévi-Strauss synthesized Frazer's comparative method with the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson to create structural anthropology, which analyzed myths by organizing their basic elements into binary oppositions.Edmund Leach was a student of Malinowski's who, in turn, synthesized his teacher's methods with those of Lévi-Strauss.  Twice removed from Frazer's orbit, Leach gazed back upon The Golden Bough as a target rather than a benchmark.  While acknowledging Frazer's status as "a colossus in the history of English scholarship," Leach nevertheless attacked him as a plagiarist, distortionist, and popularizer.  In a particularly scathing critique entitled "Golden Bough or Gilded Twig?" Leach condemned Frazer's "artistic license," claiming that he routinely embellished sources and twisted information to support already formulated theories.  Moreover, Frazer relied shamelessly on secondhand material culled from missionaries and imperial officials rather than on his own interactions with native peoples.  Furthermore, many of his comparisons of myths were based solely on superficial resemblances between a few of their elements.  Another allegation was what some critics have called Frazer's "misapplication of Darwin's theory of biological evolution to human history and psychology" in positing that cultures progress through predictable stages from a belief in magic to a belief in religion, and, finally, in science.Such criticism notwithstanding, the popularity of The Golden Bough remains undiminished and its impact on the culture of the early 20th century is indisputable.
-What is the main idea of the passage?

A) The Golden Bough was written more as a work of literature than of anthropology.
B) Progress in anthropology has made Frazer's work less relevant.
C) Frazer's work influenced the formation of structural anthropology.
D) The Golden Bough's influence on culture outweighs its influence on anthropology.