The Forager King

Science News, Sept 9, 2000 by Bruce Bower

Shortly before the publication of The Forest People, Ford masterminded an elaborate, phony correspondence with Turnbull about rare African idols allegedly offered for sale to the museum by an eccentric family that Ford had invented. The devious archaeologist simply wanted to harass and frustrate Turnbull, Grinker says.

A bad situation worsened in 1964. Ford fired off a nasty, nine-page letter about Turnbull and a host of other museum employees to the museum's director, who inadvertently allowed it to be read at a staff meeting. Eyewitness accounts gathered by Grinker recalled that Turnbull impassively scanned the letter without comment, despite its denunciation of his research, his homosexuality, and Towles.

"Colin was independent and inner-directed," recalls American Museum anthropologist Robert Carneiro, who worked at the museum during Turnbull's tenure and saw first-hand his muted reaction to Ford's letter. "I admired him very much for that."

Turnbull's independence soon got him into trouble, though. In 1965 and 1966, he did fieldwork in Uganda among the Ik (pronounced "eek"), a group of 2,000 short-stature hunters facing starvation and possible extinction. He catalogued all manner of atrocities within this group, such as gangs of youths stealing bits of food from the elderly and people tearing possessions off the bodies of their just-expired relatives.

The unabashed Mbuti booster became consumed by hatred of the Ik's behavior. In his 1973 book, The Mountain People, Turnbull portrayed the Ik as exemplars of human evil. Ecological disaster and starvation had stripped away Ik culture and left the people mired in a brutal endgame of self-interest, he argued, a state of affairs to which residents of Western countries could easily plummet.

Turnbull wanted to protect the Ik people by destroying their society. He recommended splitting up families and relocating random groups, each of about 10 individuals, to isolated parts of Uganda.

The Mountain People became another bestseller. Its radical assertions also attracted fierce criticism from anthropologists. For many, Turnbull had crossed the line from scientific description into fiction, imputing motives to the Ik that he couldn't have known and painting a crude caricature of a starving people.

For instance, Fredrik Barth of Boston University wrote in 1974 that Turnbull's book "deserves both to be sanctioned and to be held up as a warning to us all." He decried its lack of evidence for any lost Ik cultural traditions on the basis of the group's oral history or on any source other than Turnbull's opinion. Barth also criticized Turnbull on ethical grounds for publishing names and photographs of Ik who had stolen cattle or engaged in other illegal acts.

However, the book sparked productive debate, Grinker says. It compelled researchers to question whether they should tolerate all human behaviors as valid cultural expressions and to ponder whether concepts such as human rights and economic development should be applied globally. These issues remain much discussed today.