The Culture Cult

The Culture Cult - Designer Tribalism and Other Essays

“Brilliant, impassioned, and sardonic.”
Times Literary Supplement

The Culture Cult
by Roger Sandall,
Westview Press, 2001

Available from: Amazon

From Raymond Tallis in the Times Literary Supplement (08.14.02)

“Roger Sandall’s brilliant, impassioned and sardonic The Culture Cult explains among other things how the phrase ‘in our culture’ has come to be used to defend behavior that would otherwise be seen as quite abhorrent… Anyone reading this book will ever after hear the exculpatory phrase ‘in our culture’ with the terror that Bakunin said should attend the phrase ‘for reasons of state’. The ideology of culture has, one could add, replaced patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Read Tallis’s full review in the Times Literary Supplement

From The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“Fully conscious of arguing against the prevailing trend Sandall writes compellingly, marshalling anecdotes, scholarly literature and case studies in support of his project… He consistently implicates anthropology and anthropologists in The Culture Cult with a brusqueness at once refreshing and disconcerting.”

In October 2005, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Crichton chose The Culture Cult as one of the “five best books” in the past twenty years about the social effects of romantic primitivism. More recently, some of the author’s pieces have also featured on the Arts and Letters Daily website.