Dr Colin Macmillan Turnbull (November 23, 1924 - July 28, 1994) was a famous British anthropologist who gained prominence with his book The Forest People (1962), an admiring study of the Mbuti Pygmies. 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.

Turnbull became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1959, and lived in New York and Virginia with his professional collaborator and partner of 30 years, the African American Dr. Joseph Towles, as an openly gay and interracial couple in one of the smallest and most conservative towns of 1960s rural Virginia, during which time he also took up the the 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 before his death in 1994. Both Drs. Towles and Turnbull died from the complications of AIDS.

Some of Turnbull's recordings of BaMbuti music were commercially released, and his works inspired other ethnomusicological studies, such those of Simha Arom and Mauro Campagnoli.

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

See also

• African Pygmies
• Hunter gatherers
• BaMbuti People

Other researchers who studied pygmy cultures:

• Simha Arom
• Mauro Campagnoli

1924 births | 1994 deaths | British anthropologists | Ethnomusicologists | Gay writers | Naturalized citizens of the United States