I wonder if this idea of prizing private property as the pinnacle of civilization is more unique to American anthropologists of this era, when the national ideology of the US values private property perhaps more than all other Western and supposedly "civilized" states

He keeps mentioning how convincing his facts are and what they indicate, but suspiciously never seems to provide a really grounded example of this process happening and the reason he sees it as ubiquitous among mankind

I wonder why he's chosen three phases of human civilization and if it's totally arbitrary. It reminds me of the old racial scientists who disagreed whether there were three, five, or twelve races. I wouldn't be surprised if another scholar identified five phases of human society, or another eighteen, while a hundred years pass and nobody realizes what a red flag it is to be unable to reconcile that.

Frazer believes that this illusion of having some ability to control nature is ubiquitous in less advanced cultures, but I feel like he fails to explain exactly why that would be

The only references to peoples from Europe, besides some Eastern Europeans who in this time would probably still be considered primitive in a lot of ways, are references to Greeks and Romans, which looks like a clear indication that the difference in time between those civilizations and the modern Western world is like a measuring stick for how much more advanced the West is than contemporary peoples with similar practices

This comment gives me the impression that thinkers like Frazer at this time are viewing Enlightenment thought or logical thought in general as something belonging to a kind of "higher order" of civilization, within which he must have counted himself