In 1951, after his graduation from Banaras, Turnbull traveled to the Belgian Congo (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo) with Newton Beal, a schoolteacher from Ohio he met in India. Turnbull and Beal first studied the Mbuti pygmies during this time, though that was not the goal of the trip.
An "odd job" Turnbull picked up while in Africa at this time was working for the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel. Spiegel hired Turnbull to assist in the construction and transportation of a boat needed for his film. This boat was the African Queen, which was used for the feature film The African Queen (starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn; 1951).[3] After his first trip to Africa, Turnbull traveled to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, where he worked as a geologist and gold miner for a year,[4] before he went back to school to obtain another degree.
Upon returning to Oxford in 1954, Turnbull began specializing in the anthropology of Africa. He remained in Oxford for two years before another field trip to Africa, finally focusing on the Belgian Congo (1957–58) and Uganda. After years of fieldwork, he finally achieved his anthropology doctorate from Oxford in 1964.
In 1972, having been commissioned to come up with an explanation and solution to the difficulties experienced by the Ik people, he published his controversial ethnography The Mountain People. The Ik were a hunter-gatherer tribe who had been forced to stop moving around ancestral lands, through the seasons, because it now involved the three national borders of Uganda, Kenya and Sudan. Forced to become stationary in Uganda, and without a knowledge base and culture for survival under such conditions, they failed to thrive, even to the point of starvation and death. He described the Ik as driven to a radically selfish condition in which they felt no care or responsibility for anyone else, even their children.
The Mountain People was later adapted into a theatrical work by playwright Peter Brook.[5]
Contributions to music
Some of Turnbull's recordings of Mbuti music were commercially released, and his works inspired other ethnomusicological studies, such as those of Simha Arom and Mauro Campagnoli. His recording of Music of the Rainforest Pygmies, recorded in 1961, was released on CD by Lyrichord Discs. His recording of a Zaire pygmy girls' initiation song was used on the Voyager Golden Record.[6]
Personal life
Turnbull's partner, Joseph Allen Towles, was born in Senora, Virginia, on 17 August 1937. In 1957 he moved to New York City to pursue a career as an actor and writer. He met Turnbull in 1959 and they exchanged marriage vows the following year.[7]
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 for boys and the Asa myth of origin among the Mbo of the Ituri forest.
In 1979, they traveled studying the concept of tourism as pilgrimage. Towles criticised Turnbull's semi-autobiographical work The Human Cycle (1983), which omitted all references to their relationship.[7]
Turnbull arranged for Towles' research to be published posthumously. It appeared in 1993 as Nkumbi initiation ritual and structure among the Mbo of Zaïre and as Asa: Myth of Origin of the Blood Brotherhood Among the Mbo of the Ituri Forest, both in Annales of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium), vol. 137.[8][9]
Later years
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 United Negro College Fund. He donated all their research materials, most of which were the product of his career, to the College of Charleston, insisting that the collection be known under Towles' name alone.[10]
In 1989, Turnbull moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to 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 by the Dalai Lama. Turnbull's partner, Joseph A Towles died of AIDS in 1988, and Turnbull had Towles's book "Nkumbi Initiation and Asa: Myth of Origin of the Blood Brotherhood Among the Mbo of the Ituri Forest" published posthumously. Turnbull himself died of AIDS in 1994.[11][12][13]
Controversy
Some later scholars criticized Turnbull's account of the Ik. Bernd Heine, who visited the tribe 20 years after Turnbull, provided new information in a 1985 article that appeared to discredit Turnbull's unflattering portrayal.[14] 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 better life prior to displacement, and therefore exaggerated the tribe's social dysfunction in the years Turnbull was present. [15]
1978 "Rethinking the Ik: A functional Non-Social System". In: Charles D. Laughlin Jr.; Ivan A. Brady (ed.): Extinction and Survival in Human Populations. New York: Columbia University Press
Podcast BBC Radio 4 "Sideways" 28 minute "Matthew Syed examines the work of the controversial anthropologist Colin Turnbull who claimed to have discovered 'the most selfish people on earth'."
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