Anthropologist Colin Turnbull was born London in 1924, and
raised in a surreal upper class family, which he described in his important
book, The
Human Cycle. World War Two jolted
the pampered lad into the bloody real world.
In the 1950s, he spent lots of time in the Congo, with the Mbuti Pygmies,
who inspired his masterpiece, The Forest
People. It was a beautiful
life-changing experience to live with healthy, happy humans who were profoundly
in love with their sacred forest — nothing like the zombies of England.
When war in the Congo zapped his plans for another visit, he
accepted an assignment to learn about the Ik tribe in northeastern Uganda. The government wanted a plan for transforming
them into law-abiding taxpaying farmers.
For unknown thousands of years, they had been hunter-gatherers in the
Kidepo Valley, an arid mountainous savannah.
In 1962, their traditional lands became a 540 square mile
(1,399 sq km) wildlife preserve, the Kidepo Valley National Park. Hunting was banned, and the Ik were moved
into the mountains. They were expected
to magically shape shift into farmers in a region that experienced droughts
about one in every four years.
Turnbull’s study ran from 1965 to 1967, and the first two years were
back-to-back droughts. Crops withered in
the fields, the granaries were empty, and about 2,000 people began to starve. Turnbull described the cultural meltdown in The
Mountain People.
Turnbull wrote, “The hunter and gatherer gives little thought
for the morrow, getting his feed fresh, from day to day, with the ready
assurance of someone who has come to terms with the world around him. He knows the world he lives in as few others
do, and he lives in sympathy with it, rather than trying to dominate it.” A farmer can lose a year’s work in one
night. A hunter can only lose a day’s
work.
When he first got there, the famine was just beginning. Two months later, the horror began. People became totally self-centered. Their two interests in life were now food and
water. Most became habitual liars, and
most took every opportunity steal Turnbull’s stuff. They pulled many juvenile pranks on him, hoping
for him to get hurt or die. “The people
were as unfriendly, uncharitable, inhospitable, and generally mean as any
people can be.” They laughed hard at
anyone’s misfortunes. It was amusing to
steal food from the feeble, and push them down.
Upon being weaned at age three, youngsters were thrown out of
their parents’ house. Evicted children
formed bands and wandered the countryside looking for something to eat. Lucky ones found some figs, the unlucky ate
dirt and pebbles, and soon died. Feeding
children and elders, who couldn’t take care of themselves, was a foolish waste
of precious nutrients.
Turnbull was often scolded for his idiotic generosity. He was feeding folks who were soon to be
dead, cruelly prolonging their misery. Adults
refused to feed their starving parents, or let them into their house. When they died, most were quickly buried in
the family compound, in secrecy. If the
villagers found out, they would expect a funeral ceremony, which required a
feast.
Famines were a crappy time to be born. Nobody was happy to see you, nobody cared. When out foraging, mothers put their babies
down roughly, and didn’t watch them carefully.
Maybe a hungry leopard would relieve her of her little bummer. One time, a leopard ate a baby. Sleepy from a delicious meal, the cat laid
down for nice nap. Men found it, killed
it, and ate it, baby and all.
Turnbull once took pity on an old woman who was close to
death. He wanted to create a new
village, where the abandoned people could be properly cared for. She was not interested. She wanted to die near her son, who would not
take care of her. Turnbull fed her, and
gave her some food. She burst into
tears, because this triggered memories of “a time when people had helped each
other, when people had been kind and good.”
She was the last survivor who remembered the good old days.
Stuff like this fills most of the book. Turnbull spent 18 months eating by himself in
his Range Rover. For some reason, he got
the blues. He hoped “that we who have
been civilized into such empty beliefs as the essential beauty and goodness of
humanity may discover ourselves before it is too late.” “Most of us are unlikely to admit readily
that we can sink as low as the Ik, but many of us do, and with far less cause.” Whoa!
I first read The
Mountain People in 2001, and it snapped my mind. It was an unforgettable book that you wished
you could forget. I was blindsided by
the misery, cruelty, and horror, and this was the impression that I took away
from the book. In 2017, I read the book
a second time, and it blew me away again, for another reason. Near the end of the book, Turnbull shared
some troubling conclusions that I was too dazed to grasp in my first reading. He held up a mirror, so his well-fed readers could
see their own deformities, and get their noses rubbed in them.
Having spent years with the Mbuti, he had directly
experienced a healthy functional society.
Before that, he had grown to adulthood in twentieth century Western
society, a world of atomic bombs, concentration camps, and the brutal extermination
of tens of millions. It was the opposite
of a functional society. It had become
pathologically individualized and de-socialized — similar to the Ik, and in
many ways worse. The Ik give us a taste of
our days to come.
“We pursue those trivial, idiotic technological encumbrances
and imagine them to be the luxuries that make life worth living, and all the
time we are losing our potential for social rather than individual survival,
for hating as well as loving, losing perhaps our last chance to enjoy life with
all the passion that is our nature and being.” Today, Americans speed down the highways in
their motorized wheelchairs while the polar ice melts, and monster hurricanes
obliterate societies. Sorry kids!
Here is a comment, from 45 years ago, that could have been
written today. “The state itself, is
resting ever more on both intellectual and physical violence to assert
itself.” Heads of state and their
assistants fill the air with “loud-mouthed anti-intellectual blabberings.” The populace learns not to believe, trust,
love, hope, or think.
The Mbuti enjoyed a society harmonized by a common set of
beliefs, values, and lifestyles.
Everyone was on the same channel.
Our society is a cranky boisterous mob of numerous competing cultures,
classes, and religious beliefs. “In
larger-scale societies we are accustomed to diversity of belief, we even
applaud ourselves for our tolerance, not recognizing that a society not bound
together by a single powerful belief is not a society at all, but a political
association of individuals held together only by the presence of law and force
— the existence of which is a violence.”
Love is not a hardwired function, like breathing. It has to be learned. When love is not reciprocated, it dies. The Ik demonstrated that love can go extinct. When lonely consumers are starving for love
in modern society, many choose to purchase companions. “The keeping of pets,
which is one of the characteristics special to civilization, indicates a
deterioration in human relationships.”
The Ik were excessively individualistic, spending their days
in solitude and boredom, rarely forming significant relationships. Each one was alone, and content to be alone. Turnbull often sat with Ik men on a ridge
overlooking the valley, gazing into space.
Day after day, all day long, not a word was ever spoken. This reminds me of the spooky smart phone
cult in my town today. People gather
around tables in a café, each silently gazing at their glowing screens.
The Ik expelled their children from home at age three. Westerners wait until kindergarten, when the
kids begin their decades of institutionalization. The state now oversees health, education, and
welfare. We are indoctrinated with an “individualism
that is preached with a curious fanaticism.”
This radical individualism “is reflected in our cutthroat economics,
where almost anything is justified in terms of an expanding economy and the
consequent confinement of the world’s riches in the pockets of the few.”
When it was released in 1972, The Mountain People got a lot of attention. Immediately, hordes of dignified scholars
explosively soiled their britches.
Heresy! The Ik were nothing but
an extreme exception, a bizarre mutation!
Civilized humans are moral and virtuous!
We are the greatest!
Turnbull, Colin M., The
Mountain People, Touchstone, New York, 1972.
HERE
is a 5-minute video about Colin Turnbull and the Mbuti. The narrator says, “His advisor at Oxford
wrote that Colin Turnbull is tall, fair, handsome, impulsive, and elusive. All his screws are loose, real communication
with him seems impossible. Perhaps one
has to belong to one of the backwards races in order to get his wavelength.”
