Posted in Africana, Civilization, For the Record, New, Open Societies & the Culture Cult, Tribalism.
There’s a small problem with Kwame A. Appiah’s The Honor Code — it doesn’t explain why his “moral revolution” against slavery never took place in Africa itself.
Posted in Civilization, New, Open Societies & the Culture Cult, Tribalism.
There is no “Libyan People”. The phrase should be banned as misleading and purely rhetorical. In places like Libya one’s first allegiance is to family, clan, and tribe…
Posted in Civilization, For the Record, New, Notes.
Those funny things in glass cases may have awkward histories. A museum guide sometimes has to euphemize, dissimulate, and deceive…
Posted in New, People, Tribalism.
What’s with The Arabian Nights? How explain the attraction of the mysteriously medieval East? The djinns? The camels? The alluring houris in their dove-grey veils…
Posted in Tribalism.
The Roosevelt Indian Reservation in the Amazon rain forest is not a happy place. In 2004 the Cinta Larga Indians slaughtered 29 miners there, and the Brazilian who was trying to mediate the conflict was later murdered at a…
Posted in Arts and Letters, Civilization.
Judging from his new book Beauty, Roger Scruton’s idea of a pleasing view would probably be the Wiltshire countryside circa 1750, with some red-coated riders and a fox hurrying into a copse…
Posted in Arts and Letters, Civilization, People, Theatre.
It had been a pretty ordinary day at the office, metaphysically speaking, but it looked like ending with a bang. Plato was showing Aristotle something he’d found on the web…
Posted in People.
A sense of danger is a wonderful thing — like Darwin said, don’t leave home without it. A sense of danger warns you of the bear in the cave and the shark beyond the breakers…
Posted in Artists And Politics.
Where are the sheiks of yesteryear riding romantically over the dunes? Not in Australia. Here a burly Egyptian with an ugly turn of phrase has set new records for ungallantry…
Posted in Artists And Politics, Arts and Letters, For the Record, People.
John Gunther was in Moscow when the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, and Churchill was keen to know how it was received on the streets…
Posted in Civilization.
Mungo Park was lucky to have a horse for his getaway, for as Nigel Barley relates, a modern traveller in West Africa may have to deal with…
Posted in Language, Open Societies & the Culture Cult.
For 100 years anthropology has been spreading sweetness and light, and now that even the oddest customs from the remotest places…
An Australian writer living in Sydney, Roger Sandall is the author of The Culture Cult (2001), a study of romantic primitivism and its effects. His work has appeared in a number of places including Commentary, The American Interest, Encounter, The New Criterion, The American, Sight and Sound, Quadrant, Art International, The New Lugano Review, The Salisbury Review, Merkur, Mankind, Visual Anthropology, and Social Science and Modern Society.