The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays (review)

This highly controversial polemic is an assimilationist intervention in antipodean debates over aboriginal rights, and an ultra-modernist assault on the predominance of the postmodern “litterateur” in contemporary anthropology. Sandall, a former senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sydney, argues that the interests of aboriginal peoples are damaged by a cultural atavism that is promoted by policy-makers and intellectuals, and internalized by aboriginal leaderships. But the intemperate tone of the book will simply strengthen the convictions of Sandall’s opponents and will convince few readers that he is motivated by a concern for aboriginal peoples.

The Culture Cult at least has the merit of a clear and internally consistent thesis. Sandall argues that public policy and anthropology are both dominated by the Counter-Enlightenment “noble savage” tradition, in which simple societies are romanticized and used as a perspective from which to critique more complex ones. While official and academic opinion therefore attributes the severe difficulties facing aboriginal communities to colonization, Sandall believes these difficulties arise from the traditional cultures themselves, which he considers dysfunctional in the modern world. He therefore concludes that political independence and cultural retrenchment will merely exacerbate aboriginal problems, which can only be solved through assimilation.

Sandall takes his theoretical framework from Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and favorably compares the “spontaneous order” of western open societies to the “deliberate order” of closed tribal societies founded on “domestic repression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints” (p.viii). For Sandall, these two forms of social organization are entirely irreconcilable, and progress from closed to open societies requires the cultural equivalent of what in Schumpeterian economics is called “creative destruction” (p.3) Citing Ernest Gellner in Conditions of Liberty (1994), Sandall argues that humankind faces three choices: tribalism, the pseudo-tribalism of modern authoritarianism and totalitarianism, and the civil society model of the west. Clearly, Sandall’s ideal is the universal application of liberal principles in politics, economics, and culture.

Such an outcome would, of course, be dystopian to postmodern celebrants of multiculturalism, the roots of whose ideas Sandall finds in Rousseau, before whom “savagery was obviously and unarguably ignoble, and tribal life was regarded in most places with horror” (p.39). Among more recent thinkers, Sandall indicts Karl Polanyi for his medievalist anti-capitalism and for his admiration of West African social and economic models. He also targets Isaiah Berlin for his sympathetic rendition of Herderian romanticism and his defense of value-pluralism. Sandall looks to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930) to explain the appeal of primitivism, and concludes that it is “a Western sentimentalism fashionable among spoiled, white, discontented urbanites” (p.x). He also condemns primitivism for its intellectually dishonest reliance on archaeologically falsifiable mythologies, such as the Edenic environmental stewardship of the Maoris.

Without doubt, The Culture Cult makes several valid points. Primitivism is largely a colonial condescension. And western claims of superior achievements in health, education, wealth-creation and personal freedom certainly merit more serious consideration by postmodernists. Furthermore, as the Australian anthropologist Peter Sutton has convincingly argued, traditional culture must take at least some of the responsibility for contemporary aboriginal social pathologies (“The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia Since the 1970s,” in Anthropological Forum, Vol. 11, No.2, Nov. 2001).

Yet overall the book’s analysis is superficial and oversimplified. Sandall acknowledges no western flaws or aboriginal merits, and he unreasonably presents the anthropological profession as a homogeneous postmodern whole. His prose is wild, and his opponents will have fun quoting his stark juxtaposition of “tribal cultures” and “civilization” (p.105), or his definition of assimilation as “adopting the superior civilization of one’s host” (p.109). But the book’s most fundamental failing is its treatment of the Gemeinschaft ideal. Sandall concedes that “Rousseau will always be with us because fantasies about tribal life will never die” (p.124). In point of fact, ethnographers have been idealizing simpler societies at least since Tacitus wrote Germania at the end of...