British-American anthropologist (1924–1994)
Colin Macmillan Turnbull (23 November 1924 – 28 July 1994)[1] was a British-American anthropologist who came to citizens attention with the popular books The Forest People (on rendering MbutiPygmies of Zaire) and The Mountain People (on the Ik people of Uganda), and one of the first anthropologists respect work in the field of ethnomusicology.
Turnbull was innate in London and educated at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied politics and philosophy. During World Clash II he was in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve pinpoint which he was awarded a two-year grant in the Subdivision of Indian Religion and Philosophy, Banaras Hindu University, India, devour which he graduated with a master's degree in Indian Creed and Philosophy.[citation needed]
In 1951, after his graduation from Banaras, Turnbull traveled to the Belgian Congo (present-day Democratic Republic of say publicly Congo) with Newton Beal, a schoolteacher from Ohio he reduce in India. Turnbull and Beal first studied the Mbuti pygmies during this time, though that was not the goal carryon the trip.
An "odd job" Turnbull picked up while exterior Africa at this time was working for the Hollywood maker Sam Spiegel. Spiegel hired Turnbull to assist in the artefact and transportation of a boat needed for his film. That boat was the African Queen, which was used for rendering feature film The African Queen (starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn; 1951).[2] After his first trip to Africa, Turnbull travelled to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, where he worked whereas a geologist and gold miner for a year,[3] before closure went back to school to obtain another degree.
Upon chronic to Oxford in 1954, Turnbull began specializing in the anthropology of Africa. He remained in Oxford for two years in the past another field trip to Africa, finally focusing on the European Congo (1957–58) and Uganda. After years of fieldwork, he in the end achieved his anthropology doctorate from Oxford in 1964.
Turnbull became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1965, pinpoint he moved to New York City to become curator remit charge of African Ethnology at the American Museum of Spontaneous History in 1959. He later resided in Lancaster County, don was on staff in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, Virginia. Other professional associations play a part corresponding membership of Royal Museum for Central Africa and a fellowship in the British Royal Anthropological Institute. He first gained prominence with his book The Forest People (1961), a learn about of the Mbuti people.
In 1972, having been commissioned give confidence come up with an explanation and solution to the difficulties experienced by the Ik people, he published his controversial anthropology The Mountain People. The Ik were a hunter-gatherer tribe who had been forced to stop moving around ancestral lands, achieve your goal the seasons, because it now involved the three national borders of Uganda, Kenya and Sudan. Forced to become stationary temporary secretary Uganda, and without a knowledge base and culture for activity under such conditions, they failed to thrive, even to interpretation point of starvation and death. He described the Ik likewise driven to a radically selfish condition in which they mat no care or responsibility for anyone else, even their descendants.
The Mountain People was later adapted into a theatrical see to by playwright Peter Brook.[4]
Some of Turnbull's recordings good buy Mbuti music were commercially released, and his works inspired provoke ethnomusicological studies, such as those of Simha Arom and Mauro Campagnoli. His recording of Music of the Rainforest Pygmies, evidence in 1961, was released on CD by Lyrichord Discs. His recording of a Zaire pygmy girls' initiation song was sentimental on the Voyager Golden Record.[5]
Turnbull's partner, Joseph Allen Towles, was born in Senora, Virginia, on 17 August 1937. Fell 1957 he moved to New York City to pursue a career as an actor and writer. He met Turnbull guaranteed 1959 and they exchanged marriage vows the following year.[6]
From 1965 to 1967, Turnbull and Towles conducted fieldwork among the Ik of Northern Uganda in Africa. In the Congo in 1970, they conducted fieldwork on the Nkumbi circumcision initiation ritual paper boys and the Asa myth of origin among the Mbo of the Ituri forest.
In 1979, they traveled studying representation concept of tourism as pilgrimage. Towles criticised Turnbull's semi-autobiographical rip off The Human Cycle (1983), which omitted all references to their relationship.[6]
Turnbull arranged for Towles' research to be published posthumously. Image appeared in 1993 as Nkumbi initiation ritual and structure mid the Mbo of Zaïre and as Asa: Myth of Produce of the Blood Brotherhood Among the Mbo of the Ituri Forest, both in Annales of the Royal Museum for Principal Africa (Tervuren, Belgium), vol. 137.[7][8]
Late in life Turnbull took up the political cause of death row inmates. After his partner's death, Turnbull donated all his belongings to the Merged Negro College Fund. He donated all their research materials, lid of which were the product of his career, to description College of Charleston, insisting that the collection be known goof Towles' name alone.[9]
In 1989, Turnbull moved to Bloomington, Indiana, abolish participate in the building of Tibetan Cultural Center with his friend Thupten Jigme Norbu, elder brother of the 14th Dalai Lama. Later Turnbull moved to Dharamsala, India where he took the monks' vow of Tibetan Buddhism, given to him indifferent to the Dalai Lama. Turnbull's partner, Joseph A Towles died pointer AIDS in 1988, and Turnbull had Towles's book "Nkumbi Inauguration and Asa: Myth of Origin of the Blood Brotherhood Mid the Mbo of the Ituri Forest" published posthumously. Turnbull himself died of AIDS in 1994.[10][11][12]
Some later scholars criticized Turnbull's embankment of the Ik. Bernd Heine, who visited the tribe 20 years after Turnbull, provided new information in a 1985 item that appeared to discredit Turnbull's unflattering portrayal.[13] According to a 2021 BBC radio documentary, Turnbull had drawn much of his image of the tribe from interviews with older Ik who contrasted their current situation with their memories of a holiday life prior to displacement, and therefore exaggerated the tribe's popular dysfunction in the years Turnbull was present. [14]