Roger Sandall

Sandall was married to Bay Books publisher Philippa; they had two children, Richard and Emma. He died on 11 August 2012 in Australia.

After leaving AIAS in the early 1970s, Sandall became a political activist for the rights of Indigenous Australians. In 1973, Sandall joined the anthropology department at the University of Sydney as a lecturer. He wrote for a number of journals including The American Interest, Art International, Commentary, The New Criterion, Merkur, Encounter, and Quadrant. He replaced Peter Coleman as the editor of Quadrant from March 1988 to January 1989, after which he quit due to a public political clash and difficulty in drumming up interest among writers. He retired from teaching in 1993. In 2001, he published The Culture Cult with an American firm after comments he had made at a conference years prior were "grossly distorted in a[n Australian] newspaper report." In 2003, the book won him a Centenary Medal.

Sandall was finishing a librarianship course and taking photographs of the protests at Berkeley when MOMA's Willard Van Dyke recommended him to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) as a "one-man film unit." Between 1966 and 1973, Sandall made a number of documentaries, oftentimes 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.

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.

Sandall was born in Christchurch, New Zealand on 18 December 1933 and attended Takapuna Grammar School. He studied anthropology at University of Auckland (BA, 1956) and received his MFA (1962) from Columbia University. Among his teachers were Margaret Mead and Cecile Starr. He filmed Maíz as partial fulfilment of his MFA at Columbia in 1962. In 1965, he accepted a fellowship in anthropology at Columbia.