Roger Sandall

Frederick Roger Sandall (18 December 1933 – 11 August 2012) was a New Zealand-born Australian anthropologist, essayist, cinematographer, and scholar. He was a critic of "romantic primitivism", which he called "designer tribalism", and argued that this rooted Indigenous people in tradition and discouraged them to assimilate to Western culture.

He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, USA, in 1962. Among his teachers were Margaret Mead and Cecile Starr.

Filmmaker Willard Van Dyke recommended him to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS, later AIATSIS) as a "one-man film unit." Between 1966 and 1973, Sandall made a number of documentaries, often featuring sacred rituals that were shown only to small audiences in an effort to respect the privacy of these events. Despite this, he won the first prize for documentary at the Venice Film Festival in 1968 for his film Emu Ritual at Ruguri.

After leaving AIAS in the early1970s, Sandall became a political activist for the rights of Indigenous Australians. In 1973, he joined the Anthropology Department at the University of Sydney as a lecturer. He wrote essays for a number of journals and in 2001 published The culture cult : designer tribalism and other essays, which won him an Australian Centenary Medal.

(Biographical note edited from Wikipedia entry.)

Filmography

	CONISTON MUSTER [from the AIATSIS Collection] » A classic documentary about the annual muster on Coniston cattle station, north-west of Alice Springs, and its Aboriginal head stockman, Coniston Johnny, who narrates much of the film...
	CAMELS & THE PITJANTJARA [from the AIATSIS Collection] » A classic documentary from 1969 which records the Pitjantjara people’s use of feral camels in central Australia, capturing and taming them, and using them as pack animals...
	WALBIRI FIRE CEREMONY, A - Ngatjakula [from the AIATSIS Collection] » Ngatjakula is one of the most spectacular ceremonies of central Australia, employing fire, and several days of singing and dance, to resolve conflicts and re-affirm social order among the Warlpiri (Walbiri) people...
	MAKING A BARK CANOE [from the AIATSIS Collection] » Two men make a bark canoe in the swamps of coastal Arnhem Land – a process simply observed by filmmaker Roger Sandall. This film is a fine example of the many films that Roger Sandall made for the Institute of Aboriginal Studies in which he recorded Aboriginal craft techniques and skills – in this case, the process by which two men, Djurkuwidi and Wangamaru, work together to make a bark canoe...