 While "The Golden Bough" achieved wide "popular appeal" and exerted a "disproportionate" influence "on so many [20th century] creative writers", Frazer's ideas played "a much smaller part" in the history of academic social anthropology.Lienhardt himself dismissed Frazer's interpretations of primitive religion as "little more than plausible constructs of [Frazer's] own Victorian rationalism", while 
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough" (1979), wrote