|
|
Post by berimboloboy on Apr 1, 2015 1:47:33 GMT -5
I am about to start reading Turnbull's Forest People. Stephen Corry called it something like "controversial and inaccurate" though, and when someone like Corry who is the director of Survival International calls it that, it might be necessary to read it with a large grain of salt. Did anyone read this and what are your opinions on it? What about Turnbulls work in general?
|
|
|
|
Post by KT on Apr 1, 2015 9:58:52 GMT -5
Where did you see that? Quick Google search found nothing. It could have been about "The Mountain People" which is a very different book and Turnbull himself later regretted writing it.
Forest People, Wayward Servants, The Mbuti, and Human Cycle are all great books. Human Cycle, by the way, was written off as "too primitivist" almost universally when it was published.
|
|
|
|
Post by KT on Apr 1, 2015 10:07:39 GMT -5
There is a really interesting side note to this, and it merits a larger discussion, one that I get into in my (still unfinished) book, Catalyst. But in both Wayward Servants and Forest People makes some absolutely false claims about non-permissive attitudes towards homosexuality. This isn't an uncommon theme in ethnographies, but under scrutiny you can see that surface crack. In their Waorani book, the Robarchek's point out that all claims to not have homosexuality faded almost immediately after planes took off from nearby airstrips. This seems to be a point that missionaries really focused on and most societies just immediately recognized this and hid it from outsiders.
Turnbull's initial claims are overwritten by discussion about how boys would often sleep close together at night and often "made a mess of each other". Turnbull himself was bi-sexual and spent his time in the Congo and the rest of his life with his male Mbuti guide.
|
|
|
|
Post by berimboloboy on Apr 1, 2015 12:57:56 GMT -5
It's from Tribal Peoples for Tomorrow's World;
"...in the 60s and 70s, Colin Turnbull wrote two popular books. The first, The Forest People, told of BaMbuti Pygmies in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They appeared to live idyllically, and conformed closely to what the hippy movement was searching for at that time: a freedom from restraint, peace tolerance, and an easy life. Turnbull rather upset things with his next work, The Mountain People, which described the Ik in Uganda. According to him, they behaved in a monstrous and inhumane fashion. Many are now sceptical about the accuracy of these accounts, which seemed to court sensationalism, and nowadays they are widely discredited. At the time of publication, however, criticism was muted, and did not stop the works achieving a popularity which even led to one being adapted for theatrical performance."
So I find the phrasing a bit unclear, the sentence "many are now sceptical..." might refer only to The Mountain People while the next sentence apparently refer to both books.
|
|
|
|
Post by KT on Apr 1, 2015 13:19:19 GMT -5
I think nearly everything in the second half of that statement is just wrong. TMP had plenty of critics and it's genuinely not a good book, but that never caused his Mbuti work to be discredited. All that controversy surrounded the publication and Turnbull had acknowledged his overstepping regarding TMP in the Human Cycle which was printed in like 1982.
|
|
|
|
Post by landb4time on May 2, 2015 21:42:43 GMT -5
The only biography of Turnbull by R.R. Grinker focuses quite a bit on Turnbull's relationship with Joseph Towels and from what I remember Grinker adds quite a bit of context to each of Turnbull's publications, shedding light on why he was painting the Ik in such a callous way.
|
|
