At first glance, it seems terribly contradictory. The good folk who get so worked up about corporal punishment in schools are often the very persons who sing the praises of Aboriginal customary law, under which delinquents were speared in the leg.
It is the same story with many other practices. People who are contemptuous of the prerogative of governments and corporations to withhold secrets from the public are usually very keen to ensure that tribal "secret business" is kept hidden from outsiders. And those who exhort Christian churches to ordain women priests seem quite unfazed about the strong gender restrictions on religious advancement common in indigenous societies.
But these responses appear inconsistent only if we assume that the individuals expressing them are primarily concerned with equity and human rights. In fact, their motivation frequently lies elsewhere, in the resentment that many educated members of the middle class feel towards their own society, and their corresponding idealisation of cultures that seem to offer an antithesis to all their frustrations about the modern world.
These kinds of attitudes have a very long history. In the first century AD, authors such as Tacitus and Seneca held up the simple virtues of the Germanic tribes as a reproach to the degeneracy of contemporary Roman life. And as the Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall waggishly suggests, the invention of the wheel in ancient Mesopotamia was probably soon followed by loud calls "for reinstating the holy pedestrianism of the past".
Westview Press in the United States has just published Sandall's book, "The Culture Cult", an incisive collection of essays on "romantic primitivism" and "the unending revolt of the civilised against civilisation". Though witty and learned, the book is unlikely to find much favour in university anthropology departments, which it characterises, with some justification, as refuges for people who prefer shamanism to science.
Unlike the majority of contemporary anthropologists, Sandall is strongly opposed to cultural relativism, the doctrine that although cultures may differ widely, they are all equally valid frameworks for human living. (In practice, many of his colleagues, as well as other members of the intelligentsia, cleave to a modified form of the doctrine, in which one culture -- that of the West -- is somewhat inferior to all others).
In uncompromising terms, he asserts that there is "a Big Ditch" between the tribal and modern worlds. The current fashion of pretending that we can "mix 'n match", indiscriminately blending appealing aspects of tribalism and modernity, is a dangerous illusion.
Indeed, many of the most appealing elements of indigenous cultures have little to do with the reality of tribal life, either now or in the past. Rather, the "wise ecologists", "mystical sages" and "pacifist saints" from which we supposedly have so much to learn are essentially projections of our own fantasies, the outcome of what Sandall -- with the cartoon epic Pocahontas in mind -- calls "Disneyfication".
The Disneyfied portrait of tribal life can only be sustained by selectively editing the anthropological record, leaving out all the excesses, or always blaming them on contact with Europeans. Unfortunately, many contemporary anthropologists go along with this deception, pretending that brutal oppression or endemic violence or cannibalism rarely existed in the tribal world.
Anthropologists who seriously challenge this rosy picture often suffer the wrath of their colleagues. When the Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman showed that Margaret Mead's account of free love and communal bliss in Samoa was a fiction, the American Anthropological Association organised an extraordinary program of denunciation against him. A similar campaign is currently being waged against one of America's most famous anthropologists, Napoleon Chagnon, whose portrayals of Amazonian Indians as ferocious warriors has deeply upset those who believe in the harmony of tribal societies.
Of course, it could be argued that the practitioners of tribal customs were long regarded with contempt by Westerners, and that the current enthusiasm for their ways goes some way towards redressing the balance. If it were simply a matter of restoring lost self-esteem to peoples whose dignity was unjustly derided, there would be little cause for complaint. Certainly, the formerly widespread belief that indigenous peoples were intellectually inferior and incapable of mastering Western knowledge is completely false.
But as Sandall argues, illusions about tribal cultures can cause real damage to indigenous people themselves. They are being conned into thinking that they can retreat from a thorough-going embrace of the modern world, and still attain a long and healthy life, prosperity, civil rights and all the other benefits of modernity that they desire.
Unfortunately, rule by elders or chiefs, non-market economies and collective property ownership, and beliefs in a world governed by mystical and magical forces seldom lead to the culturally rich and harmonious Gardens of Eden of popular imagination. As Sandall unsentimentally puts it, "if you want to live a full life and die in your bed, then civilisation -- not romantic ethnicity -- deserves your thoughtful vote".
To the sensibilities of the contemporary intelligentsia, this is outrageous. But it would have seemed unexceptional to the Aborigines who struggled for equality in the days when it was denied them, to men like William Cooper or John Patten.
And little more than a quarter of a century ago, the late Charles Perkins penned words that could have come from Sandall himself, writing that traditional Aboriginal culture "is in some ways incompatible with western society. The two just really can't go together". What Aboriginal leader would dare say this now, unless with the proviso that it is Western society that should be rejected?
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