Colin Turnbull
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Colin Macmillan Turnbull (November 23, 1924 - July 28, 1994) was a famous British-American anthropologist who came to public attention with the popular books The Forest People (on the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire) and The Mountain People (on the Ik people of Uganda).
He was born in London and educated at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford where he studied politics and philosophy. World War II brought a stint in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve after which he was awarded a two year grant in the Department of Indian Religion and Philosophy, Banaras Hindu University, India. Upon returning to Oxford, he began specializing in the anthropology of Africa. There followed many field trips to Africa, finally focusing on the then-Belgian Congo (1957-58) and Uganda.
Turnbull became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1959, where he lived in New York City and was a Research Associate in charge of African Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. He later took up residence in Lancaster County, Virginia and was on staff in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. Other professional associations included Corresponding Membership of Le Musée Royal d’Afrique Central and fellowship in the British Royal Anthropological Institute. He first gained prominence with his book The Forest People (1961), an admiring study of the BaMbuti. In 1972, he wrote a sequel of sorts, the highly controversial The Mountain People, which was concerned with Uganda's hunger-plagued Ik tribe.
Turnbull was an unconventional scholar who rejected objectivity. He idealized the BaMbuti and reviled the Ik, and described the latter as lacking any sense of altruism, in that they force their children out of their homes at the age of three, and gorge on whatever occasional excesses of food they might find until they became sick, rather than save or share. However, several anthropologists have since argued that a particularly serious famine suffered by the Ik during the period of Turnbull's visit may have distorted their normal behaviour and customs. In the US, he lived with his professional collaborator and partner of 30 years, the African American Dr. Joseph Towles. In the 1960s, the pair were an openly gay and interracial couple residing in a small town in rural, conservative Virginia. During this time he also took up the political cause of death row inmates. After his partner's death in 1988, Turnbull retreated to a Buddhist monastery where he lived out his remaining years under a Buddhist name. Both he and Towles died from complications of AIDS.
- Some of Turnbull's recordings of BaMbuti music were commercially released, and his works have inspired other ethnomusicological studies, such those of Simha Arom and Mauro Campagnoli.
[edit] Turnbull's Books
- The Forest People, 1961
- The Lonely African, 1962
- Wayward Servants; The Two Worlds Of The African Pygmies, 1965
- Tibet (with Thubten Jigme Norbu), 1968
- The Mountain People, 1972
- Africa and Change, 1973
- Man in Africa, 1976
- The Human Cycle, 1983
- The Mbuti Pygmies : Change And Adaptation, 1983
[edit] Reference
Grinker, Roy R. 2000. In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)
[edit] See also
Research fields:
Other researchers who studied pygmy cultures:
