From the strength of his field experience in Aboriginal Australia, Mexico, India and Sri Lanka, he argued that the Western middle classes who romanticised tribal culture only did so because they had never experienced the real thing. They never understood the appeal of modernity to those locked within tribal cultures:
Whether we are talking about Indian untouchables in Calcutta, or farmers in Thailand, or peasants in Spain, all of these people want to enter the modern world and are usually quite happy to jettison the crippling cultural baggage which holds them back. Instead, the ideological defence of local and backward cultures—the promotion of the doctrine of “my culture, right or wrong”—has overwhelmingly been undertaken by radicalised Western middle-classes, on behalf of an ethnic clientèle which may or may not approve their efforts, driven by a masochistic contempt for their Western heritage, and almost as often for the lands of their birth as well.
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Roger also wrote a damaging critique of the anthropologists who brought this about. Titled “The Rise of the Anthropologue” (Encounter, December 1986) it argued that while early anthropologists had studied tribal life as disinterested observers, by the 1980s the “anthropologues” had ulterior motives, of either a political or salvationist kind, seeking means of personal redemption or models for their own political or ideological hopes. Above all, they were afflicted with a dreadful piety:
Like that prototypical anthropologue, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they are driven by a deep emotional necessity to dignify everything in the pre-industrial world. The laughable must be made grave; the repellent must be made somehow endearing; and the downright revolting must be swathed in a language so latinate and extraordinary that it is often hard to know exactly what is going on. Words like sacred, sacral and ritualistic may be called on to produce a vaguely sanctifying effect; and if this is successful, then plain speaking about African tribal life will always seem tasteless, and usually irreverent as well.
The article reserved its most scathing criticisms for the French author Claude Levi-Strauss and his celebrated work The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (trans. 1970). It was a study of myths but, instead of the science of the subtitle, Levi-Strauss disarmingly announced that it too should be regarded as mythology, more like a piece of music, in fact an “overture” to its own “confused and indigestible pages”. Roger observed that this kind of anthropology could all too easily be regarded as little more than “the telling of tales about the tales other people tell”. According to the rules of this game, there could be no such a thing as a false tale; nor could research that was successful be distinguished from research that had failed. Once this was accepted, he said, anthropology became an intellectual disaster zone
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