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The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism And Other Essays

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It's no secret that in academia these days, political correctness and identity politics often trump critical reason. So when a book comes out that eloquently defends our modern open society and deconstructs the increasing nostalgia for simpler, even primitive times, the result is invigorating. Roger Sandall's, The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays is a brave, acerbic book that takes on the folly of romanticizing and idealizing tribal/communal life, an enterprise often aided and abetted by anthropologists presenting an overly sanitized, even fictionalized, picture of the past.

Sandall, a retired lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney, Australia, traces a "discontented nostalgia for the communal life" through the work of many modern thinkers. Too often, he says, today's view of aboriginal peoples depicts "a benignly Disneyfied way of life, all flowers and contentment, all stress-free smiles and communal harmony." In reality, the lives and prospects of many aboriginal peoples today are not happy ones, and Sandall argues that the politics of preserving traditional cultures at all costs, as is now the policy in Australia and North America, may in the end do indigenous peoples a tremendous disservice. Certainly, discontent with modernity abounds within the western world, perhaps fuelled, among other things, by the collapse of traditional religious beliefs and the moral codes that went with them, as well as fear of environmental catastrophe. Thus it's not surprising that fantasies about tribal/communal alternatives to modernity have their appeal. Sandall's book exposes the fallacies of going down that road, and the pitfalls of trying to make a new moral order out of the half-understood and deeply mysterious world of Primitive Man. His passionate defence of civilization may ruffle feathers, but the book is as bracing and stimulating a read as I've enjoyed in a long time.

I am an Anthropology student and I chose to do a reivew of this book as my final term paper in my college career. Sandall is an extraoridinary writer and he presnets the hokey jargon associated with romantic primitivism and communalism clearly and cleverly. Many college students assume that the entire world is on the same level of social development-(unilineal evolution, psychic unity, etc)divided only by MISUNDERSTANDING. If you suffer from this dreamy belief, than I urge you to read The Culture Cult as soon as possible.

Sandall explains how a New Stone Age exists today. "One community after another is wiped out as countless millions of dollars of welfare payments were pissed against the wall, and petrol sniffing became widespread among juvenilles." (Sandall, 2001: 14). The self determination for Aboriginal peoples has become somewhat of a joke in the realm of education. Thousands of Aborinines are illiterate, but had grandparents who could read and write. This is progress???

Sandall addresses tribal collectivism, idyllic fantasies held by romantic primitivists, and an array of questions cut to the chase, e.g., "Why do some cultures succeed, and some fail?" or "Will cultural anthropology be phased out because it is too genral?"

This is a great read, I couldn't put it down.

Roger Sandall is a retired anthropologist and film maker who had the mixed fortune to spend some time filming the tribal rituals of Australian Aboriginals, only to find that the film was literally put into cold storage, not to be seen by human eyes for fear of giving offence. At the same time he observed the progressive takeover of academic Anthropology and related social sciences by the new wave of political correctness and relativism. These essays can be described as a mordant and somewhat mournful reflection on some of the tribal customs of progressive modernists.

The essays are grouped in three parts. Those in the first part, "Romantic Primitivism: The Anthropological Connection" are designed for a broad and general readership, to alert outsiders to some of the foibles of cultural relativists. These are the people who Ian Jarvie described as "absolutists at home" (in condemning the sins and shortcomings of the western world) and relativists abroad (it's all relative really, however cruel and irrational).

The essays in Part II "Academic Primitivism: The Political Implications" examine the way that romantic tribalism impacted on Karl Polanyi, Isaiah Berlin and Professor Ivan Sutherland, the ill-fated superior of Karl Popper in New Zealand.

The main theme of the collection is that all cultures and civilisations need to be judged by much the same set of standards, allowing for a tolerable amount of pluralism. This means that the violent and cruel initiation ceremonies of the Australian and New Guinea natives need to be viewed with the same jaundiced eye as the sadistic rites of passage in some military academies. It means that the revival of the notion of the "noble savage", originally popularised by Rousseau, is nothing short of disastrous in its implications for policies for indigenous people. Compared with the degenerates of western civilisation, the noble savage, supposedly, has a greater connection to nature and true reverence for it, a deeper spirituality and a genuine sense of community.

The essay on Karl Polanyi indicates the capacity of unworldly academics to take on board irrational and destructive views. He thought he had located the epitome of successful central planning in the West African slave-owning, large-scale human sacrificing kingdom of Dahomey. Sandall has cast a critical eye over Berlin's tolerance of cultural pluralism, claiming that Berlin accepted and promulgated the idea of Herder and the 18th century German romantics that all culture are "incommensurable" - possibly the first use of that loaded term which recently did so much damage in the hands of Feyeraband and Kuhn. This interpretation of Berlin's thought is vigorously disputed by his admirers.

Sandall's writing is clear and vigorous throughout, so anyone will find value in most of the essays, though some may be daunted by the final two pieces in the collection.

A masterpiece of fact and logic, knitted together with elegant English. And a refreshing corrective for the relentless swill of politically correct multi-culturalism.

Roger Sandall ought to have been a forensic pathologist. He brings the same clinical approach , mixed with an acerbic and utterly irreverent humour, to the question of why civilization has ceased to exist. In the world of anthropology there are no crucial experiments let alone falsification of theories. It is a literary jam session fuelled by a cocktail of personal neuroses and narcissism.

He peels back the putrefying flesh from the body of this confused and delusional area of human endeavour to reveal the causes of the putrefaction. Just as animal liberationists hate humans much more than they love animals, so do fully paid up members of the Culture Cult hate civilization. In comedy there is the concept of the internal logic of the joke and once enters the zone of the joke even the most absurd situation makes "sense". The Culture Club perpertually resides with the logic of the joke and will never see outside that construction.

The book will outrage members of the Cult. They will never see yet alone understand. Thanks to Roger Sandall they will never be taken seriously.

First of all, readers should know that these matters are supremely insignificant for the argument of The Culture Cult as a whole. The chapter where they occur is in fact about the philosopher Karl Popper, who supported the "open society" against its tribalistic adversaries, and his feud with his professor in Christchurch who endorsed the perpetuation of Maori tibalism.

The author of The Culture Cult has been in touch regarding the review below, and this is his response:

"Aw c'mon Phoebe, there's nothing nicer than a human ham, even without salt and vinegar-especially if it's been smoked. That's evidently what the dying Maori chief thought when he gasped to Judge Maning, before breathing his last, "How sweet is man's flesh!" (see Old New Zealand, Chap xiv) But what's the fuss? Most of us had cannibalistic ancestors a few thousand years ago... In any case - as should have been perfectly clear from the references in the book - my argument regarding the very well attested tradition of Maori anthropophagy is drawn directly from Tim Flannery's influential study of ecosystems and extinctions, The Future Eaters."

"In chapter 23 we're told that in New Zealand "...by the late 18th century the bodies of those killed in war were a prized source of food". The Maori author Tamihana, in his biography of his father the great chief Te Rauparaha, "made it clear that the flesh of the victims of war were a valued resource. Indeed, it appears likely that without the protein-rich fuel that they represented, the many long and strenuous raids undertaken up and down the coast by chiefs such as Te Rauparaha would not have been possible. Human bodies were certainly the principal food resource during these long voyages." And so on. Maori cannibalism was I'm afraid not the ritual delectation of tid-bits. Serious eating was involved."

"As for those seals, it's good to know they're flourishing at Kaikoura again. But what Flannery was talking about when he wrote of various marine mammals being hunted to extinction was the situation between four hundred and six hundred years ago. We know about this from the archaeological evidence. Two varieties of seal were in fact killed and eaten out (the three-tonne elephant seal and the half-tonne sea-lion) disappearing from New Zealand forever. As for the fur seals, "By 1600 AD all breeding colonies of fur seals on the North Island and northern South Island had been exterminated." Just those accessible mainland colonies, OK? The few survivors very sensibly moved offshore to islands where they couldn't be hunted and eaten by hungry Maori. That they have now swum back to Kaikoura again is good news."

The Culture Cult is an ascerbic, sarcastic text that is more concerned with browbeating readers with its stringent defence of Western civilization than examining tribal cultures beyond mere stereotypes. I originally picked up this book because I was interested in the results of the romanticisation of tribal cultures. The tendency to romanticise tribal cultures as being closer to nature and more at one with nature has a long history especially among colonial settlers (though in their haste to be seen as higher animals, of course there was less romanticization and more condescending observation). Often, this romanticization does not fit with the events of the past.

But, Sandall is no objective commentator, attempting to see similarities between civilization and tribal culture and temper romanticization of tribalism. He is batting for civilization, denigrating tribal cultures as wasteful, ignorant, unaware and incapable of connecting with the environment in an ecologically sound way. For example, his claim that Maori first wiped out the moa, then the seals before turning to cannibalism displays scant regard for New Zealand history in his desperation to prove that tribal cultures annihilated the environment as Western civiliztion has, does and will continue to do (pp. 122.) (Of course, Sandall is actually trying to prove that tribal cultures were worse than civilization)

The one fact in this example that Sandall manages to get right is that the moa were decimated by Maori. Not so the seals. European sealers arrived in New Zealand in their hundreds at the beginning of the 1800s to join in the sealing trade with grave consequences for seal populations. But, sealing stopped in the 1900s and the seal population is slowly recovering. Go to Kaikoura and have a gawk, Roger!

The comment "After using up all the large birds and mammals, the polynesians now began to eat each other"(122) is fantastical. Yes there was cannibalism BETWEEN tribes DURING or AS A RESULT OF warfare. If Sandall wants to present cannibalism he has a duty to do just a smidge of research rather than merely extrapolate what he would like to believe. New Zealand was not a nation before the signing of The Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and a number of Maori tribes lived on the islands as individual tribes. There were alliances between some tribes and often wars were fought over land and resouces. Cannibalism occurred between tribes after wars in a ritualistic manner that has been documented in other tribes. Cannibalism did not occur because people were hungry ("predation by other hungry humans" according to Sandall), nor, as Sandall negligently suggests, did they eat their "own".

There are many factual inaccuracies throughout this book. Sandall depicts tribal cultures as barbaric and less evolved than civilization which I am sure he, and many of his readers, find very soothing but this adds little to modern debates. This book is a bitter diatribe for people who want to believe in the superiority of Western civilization. Polarising tribal culture and civilization just fuels exaggerated stereotypes and offers no real solutions to how countries with indigenous populations who predated, and were taken advantage of and abused by, colonial settlements (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America....) are to move forward into the future together.