The Forager King

Science News, Sept 9, 2000 by Bruce Bower

From 1974 to 1976, Turnbull helped British director Peter Brook produce a well-received stage version of his book about the Ik. The project underscored Turnbull's conviction that anthropology can be art as well as science. After viewing the play, Turnbull told Brook that it had helped him see the Ik's humanity and how nasty a person he had become among them.

A chastened Turnbull then pursued a study of legal and ethical issues surrounding the death penalty in the United States. He befriended numerous death-row inmates in Florida and worked to overturn their death sentences.

In 1982, Turnbull retired from teaching to care for Towles, who had started to act erratically and appeared emotionally distraught. When Towles died in 1988, Turnbull held a double funeral, saying that the second coffin contained his own spirit, which had perished with his partner.

He devoted the rest of his life to Buddhist studies. In 1992, the Dalai Lama ordained Turnbull as a Buddhist monk in India. Two years later, Turnbull died of AIDS in a Virginia hospital.

Grinker still disagrees with Turnbull's descriptions of the Mbuti and the Ik. Recent evidence indicates that the Mbuti and other tropical foragers work closely with nearby farmers in what amount to complex societies (SN: 7/1/00, p. 8). For their part, the Ik have begun to rebound from past food shortages and more clearly exhibit a cultural tradition that was never starved into submission, according to both Grinker and Carneiro.

On the other hand, Turnbull's fearlessness, stubborn independence, and ability to mix personal with professional interests struck a deep chord in his biographer. Other accomplished but lesser-known ethnographers--some from well before Turnbull's time--possessed the same traits, asserts anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Their contributions illustrate the need for anthropologists to reinvigorate ethnographic work rather than turn their backs on it, as increasingly seems to be the case, Mintz says in the April CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY.

Consider James Mooney, an ethnographer with no academic training who more than 100 years ago launched a landmark study of Native American religious practices. Mooney, who wrote a classic 1896 book on the Sioux Ghost Dance religion, took an intense personal interest in the plight of Native Americans and developed close friendships with many of those he studied.

His passionate defense of the rights of Indians to use peyote in their religious ceremonies earned him enemies in the federal government's Bureau of Ethnography, which sponsored his work. In 1918, the bureau denied him permission to continue his Native American fieldwork.

Mintz approvingly cites a quote that Mooney gave to a reporter in 1893: "Unless you live with people, you cannot know them. It is the only way to learn their ideas and study their character."

That doesn't mean that insightful fieldwork comes easily. Colin Turnbull, for one, made what Grinker and others view as crucial mistakes in his portrayals of the Mbuti and the Ik.