Colin Turnbull
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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 BaMbuti Pygmies. In 1972, he wrote his most controversial classic, The Mountain People, which portrayed Uganda's hunger-plagued Ik tribe. Turnbull was an unconventional scholar who rejected objectivity. He idealized the BaMbuti and reviled the Ik, whom he recounted as so coldly self-absorbed that they allowed their children to die if they could not survive after being kicked out at the age of three, and refused to share food with anyone, even gorging on the occasional excess of food until they got sick, rather than save or share.
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.
See also
Research fields:
Other researchers who studied pygmy cultures:
External links
- African Pygmies Culture and music of the forest People, with photos and ethnographic notes