The Culture Cult. Designer Tribalism and Other Essays. (Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus)

Sandall, Roger. The Culture Cult. Designer Tribalism and Other Essays. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001, 214 pp. This is a book which is at times polemical, entertaining and insightful, at others superficial, simplistic and frustrating. The very structure book is somewhat confusing: subtitle suggests a collection essays (whose connection is indeed at times tenuous), but book is arranged as a continuous sequence parts and chapters which suggest a coherent argument. Sandall, prior to his retirement an anthropologist at University Sydney, Australia, criticizes what he sees as romantic primitivism in anthropology and other social sciences which conjures up images or ethnic cultures that are often deliberately simplified and carefully cleansed all negative characteristics. Designer tribalism contends that all cultures stand on same plane. Traditional cultures are not only not inferior but offer valuable lessons for modern society: their communal ways, egalitarian social structures, and harmony with environment are presented as solutions for modern social and environmental ills. Sandall responds with an unqualified defence modernity. Many traditional societies are in fact inferior. Communal life and egalitarian structures are more often than not developmental dead ends. The history many early societies is a history tyranny, violence and environmental devastation. In Sandall's words the garden human cultures contains as many stink-lilies as violets, strangling vines as primroses, sick societies as those with rosy cheeks -- and too many problems in modern world come from sentimentally denying this fact. The benign image traditional societies promoted by cult is in fact a synthetic mix genuine and invented fictionalized pasts, used by aboriginal ideologues and their non-native allies for political expediency and personal gain. What is worse, political decisions based on such culturally justified false beliefs condemn contemporary cultures to economic and social stagnation. The pre-1970s policies trying to help them overcome their backwar dness through creative destruction have given way to policies which maintain indigenous identity through psychological and moral reconciliation which does little more than rejig public mind, ask leading political figures to adopt a contrite demeanor and apologize for sins history. This may have considerable political appeal, but is often counterproductive: Sandall argues that Australian aborigines who have assimilated have made impressive gains, while those who were victims anti-assimilationist policies embraced and promoted by idealistic middle-class whites in south have seen their literacy levels fall, experienced deteriorating health, and have suffered from administrative waste and corruption. The handover education, policing and health care to native self-administration has merely assured that development has passed them, a fact that is covered up by mandatory silence imposed by political correctness: no one dares say a thing. Sandal maintains that there is a big ditch, a threshold modernity which must be crossed if backward societies are to catch up with three principal achievements modern society: a democratic political system, an independent judiciary, and a market economy. Democracy was discovered in early Greece. It was strengthened by gradual emergence an independent legal system and market capitalism in Europe and America and then spread around globe. These changes represent a universal adaptive process, and are a fundamental prerequisite for social and economic progress. Sandall traces intellectual origins cult to Rousseau's noble savage and Herder's view that each culture is of literally inestimable value in its own society, and consequently to humanity as a whole. …

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