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Mountain People
Book by Colin m.turnbull
309 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1972
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About the author
Colin M. Turnbull
28 books25 followersColin Macmillan Turnbull (November 23, 1924 – July 28, 1994) was a British-American anthropologist who came to public attention with the popular books The Forest People (on the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire) and The Mountain People (on the Ik people of Uganda), and one of the first anthropologists to work in the field of ethnomusicology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews
August 27, 2014
A 1972 account of a mid-60s anthropological field trip to northern Uganda seemed like fairly intriguing but hardly spectacular stuff. But it turns out that this was one of the all time most controversial books about Africa ever written. I didn't know!
Or as one blog puts it
EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK IS COMPLETELY FALSE.
And another blog says this:
What does it say about Western intellectual life that such obvious nonsense could spread so easily across the Anthropological borderline into popular culture and thence into the received wisdom of the age?
And yet, here’s a blurb by the all-time Margaret Mead : “A beautiful and terrifying book” and Ashley Montagu (another top anthropologist)
An important book, for it represents a…study of a unique people – a people who are dying because they have abandoned their humanity. The parallel with our own society is deadly.
Now, perhaps that last sentence has a clue in it. Whew. So let’s try to figure this thing. It’s a weird and complicated story.
What exactly happened anyway?
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
First Colin Turnbull, English anthropologist, wrote a book called The Forest People in 1961, an account of the idyllic life of the Mbuti, who are Congolese pygmies. CT loved loved loved the Mbuti and his book was a hit.
THE EXPULSION FROM THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Then he made another two year field trip in 1965-6 to study an obscure Ugandan tribe called the Ik.
IK = HELL
The account he gives is horrendous. It’s a version of Hell. He says that the Ik were hunter gatherers originally, but because of the creation of national parks, the government had forced them to become subsistence farmers, penning them in the mountainous northern corner of the country where it rains only two or three years in every four, and where the soil is poor. He says that the destruction of their formerly sustainable hunter-gatherer life caused Ik society to crumble. Food became ever scarcer. A low-level famine was ever-present, and this led to behaviour becoming ever more viciously individualistic. The family unit practically dissolved. The young and the old were not cared for. Anyone who could not feed him or herself was useless, already dead.
A TYPICAL ANECDOTE WHICH SETS THE TONE BUT WHICH YOU MAY CHOOSE TO DISBELIEVE
[Up to the age of three, the Ik child is ] carried about in a hide sling wherever the mother goes, and since the mother is not strong this is done grudgingly. … whenever the mother is at a water hole or in her fields she loosens the sling and lets the baby to the ground none too slowly, and of course laughs if it is hurt. I have seen Bila and Matsui do this many a time. Then she goes about her business, leaving the child there, almost hoping that some predator will come along and carry it off. This happened once while I was there – and the mother was delighted. She was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it… The men set off and found the leopard, which had consumed all of the child except part of the skull; they killed the leopard and cooked it and ate it, child and all.
ATUM’S WIFE DOES HIM A FAVOUR
Atum was an old Ik (i.e. over 40) who was very helpful to CT as he established himself in the village. One day he said his wife was sick. He asked CT for food and medicine for her, which CT gave him. After a while when she continued being sick CT suggested she should go to a hospital. Atum declined – “she was not that sick”.
Then after a while, when I still had not once seen her, his brother-in-law, the beady-eyed Lomongin, sidled up to me and said he supposed I knew that Atum was selling the medicine I was giving him for his wife. I was not unduly surprised, and merely remarked that that was too bad for his wife. “Oh no,” said Lomongin, enjoying the joke enormously, “she has been dead for weeks. He buried her inside the compound so you wouldn’t know.”
And later
I was told this was the best thing to do with old people who died. A funeral, it was said, was a nuisance to everyone, and made everyone upset with all the crying and wailing. I would have given quite a lot to believe that the Ik were capable of crying and wailing at that point.
And later, regarding another old man
In a very short time Loomeraniang was dead, and his son refused to come down from the village above and bury him; his sister hurried over and snatched his few belongings, leaving the corpse.
MORE TALES FROM HELL
caption on a photo
After eighteen years of age Ik women lose their ability to charm the cattle herders [who are a different tribe], and their fellow Ik have neither the energy nor the affection to spare. At eighteen a woman begins to enter the loneliness and isolation of old age.
Caption on another photo
Adupa, in the unused kitchen area of her compound, which was to become her grave. She made the mistake of thinking of it as a home. Her parents were unable to feed her, and when she persisted in her demands they shut her in. She was too weak to break her way out, and after a few days her dead body was unceremoniously thrown out.
Caption on another photo which shows a small boy and his taller brother
Liza, younger brother of Murai, died while his older brother thrived. He made the mistake of expecting more of family than mere tolerance. Murai would eat while his brother, starving, watched. Yet he showed no malice or hatred, no regret, nothing. As Murai said, surely, it is better that one lives than that they both should die.
CT remarks that in famine conditions
There simply was not room, in the life of these people, for such luxuries as family and sentiment and love. So close to the verge of starvation, such luxuries could mean death, and is it not a singularly foolish luxury to die for someone who is already dead, or weak, or old? This seemed to strike hard at the assumption that there are such things as basic human values, at the very notion of virtue, of goodness even.
The Ik present us with
an opportunity for testing the cherished notion that love is essential to survival. If it is, the Ik should have it. Whether it makes them or us any different from other animals is a matter of opinion, but I must confess that early during fieldwork I wrote back that I could not believe I was studying a human society ... I searched for evidence of love almost from the beginning, I found more of it in ... two baby leopards than I did among the Ik.
IS ANTHROPOLOGY A DIGNIFIED PROFESSION?
Of course the proper study of man is Man, man in this sense meaning woman too, of course, of course. But I dunno, the notion of a white intellectual paying the natives to build him a hut and a road to the hut so he can get his fucking Landrover up the hill, and living in this hut for a couple of years, and trying to learn all about this society, and then after this brief period trotting back to the University of Rich White America and writing down what he thinks about these poor benighted starvelings kind of sticks in my throat more than somewhat. And this particular book stuck in a lot of people’s craws, which made a lot of other people want to read it.
THERE WAS A VIOLENT REACTION TO THIS BOOK
One reviewer said
the author’s manner of presentation is distasteful and his general comments about the nature of man and society are both simplistic and questionable.
And
Rather than being a study of the Ik, this is an autobiographical portrait of the author utilizing the Ik as counters for expressing his personal feelings and experiences in the field. We are assured of the author's intrepidity (30), sensitivity (114), and given passages of embarrassingly purple prose (3o). Dr. Turnbull clearly had a dreadful field-trip and has succeeded in conveying this to the reader (Reviewer : T.O. BEIDELMAN)
Another colleague, Frederik Barth, entitled his review of The Mountain People “On Responsibility and Humanity: Calling a Colleague to Account”
and he said (I will quote him at length, it's good)
It is emotionally either dishonest or superficial. It is deeply misleading to the public it sets out to inform. Most disturbingly, it is grossly irresponsible and harmful to its unwitting objects of study.
To give a key to some of my indignation, let me illustrate how named Ik are exposed in the anthropologist's text. Their illegal activities are publicized to anyone who bothers to read the book: named persons are accused of cattle theft or fencing stolen cattle (p. 110); the location of corrals for such purposes is given (p. 278); photographs are provided showing named persons forging forbidden spears or engaged in illegal poaching {facing p. 128). Perhaps the anthropologist trusts that the authorities (referred to as "Obote's specially trained thugs," p. 108) will be ineffective in utilizing such information.
And
the face which the anthropologist presented to the Ik seems strongly marked by the Bwana complex. One of the clearest expressions is found in his relationship to Kauar, who emerges from the description (pp. 88-89) as a true Uncle Tom, who used to volunteer to make the long two-day walk into Kaabong and the even more tiring two-day climb back to get mail for me. ... He was always pleased with himself when he came back, and asked if he had made the trip more quickly than the last time. ... Then he used to sit and watch while I read the mail, studying the expression on my face to see if all was well. When we drank tea together he always took exactly the same number of teaspoons of sugar that I took, and helped himself to exactly the same number of biscuits, never more, never less.
When one day Kauar fell dead on his return marathon, Turnbull is indignant at the lack of compassion shown by the Ik, while "I still see his open, laughing face, see him giving precious tidbits to the children, comforting some child who was crying, and watching me read the letters he carried so lovingly for me. And I still think of him probably running up that viciously steep mountainside so that he could break his time record, and falling dead in his pathetic prime because he was starving" (p. 89).
GETTING IN TOUCH WITH YOUR INNER NAZI
Well, I have to agree with this reviewer from 1973. This whole thing begins to be nauseating after a while. CT portrays himself as a lover of Africa, and surely he did love parts of it, but the Ik freaked him out so much by their abjectness and squalor that the old judgemental colonial paternalism kind of rose up inside Colin and overwhelmed him, the old heart of darkness thing. He ends up saying that it would be better if the Ugandan government solved the Ik problem by forcibly rounding them up and dispersing them round the country in groups of ten or so. Since they no longer have any strong family bonds it would do them no harm. They could blend in with other tribes and that would be a final solution to the Ik problem.
What a book. I am most profoundly happy to be done with it.
Oh, and I don’t recommend it.
Or as one blog puts it
EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK IS COMPLETELY FALSE.
And another blog says this:
What does it say about Western intellectual life that such obvious nonsense could spread so easily across the Anthropological borderline into popular culture and thence into the received wisdom of the age?
And yet, here’s a blurb by the all-time Margaret Mead : “A beautiful and terrifying book” and Ashley Montagu (another top anthropologist)
An important book, for it represents a…study of a unique people – a people who are dying because they have abandoned their humanity. The parallel with our own society is deadly.
Now, perhaps that last sentence has a clue in it. Whew. So let’s try to figure this thing. It’s a weird and complicated story.
What exactly happened anyway?
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
First Colin Turnbull, English anthropologist, wrote a book called The Forest People in 1961, an account of the idyllic life of the Mbuti, who are Congolese pygmies. CT loved loved loved the Mbuti and his book was a hit.
THE EXPULSION FROM THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Then he made another two year field trip in 1965-6 to study an obscure Ugandan tribe called the Ik.
IK = HELL
The account he gives is horrendous. It’s a version of Hell. He says that the Ik were hunter gatherers originally, but because of the creation of national parks, the government had forced them to become subsistence farmers, penning them in the mountainous northern corner of the country where it rains only two or three years in every four, and where the soil is poor. He says that the destruction of their formerly sustainable hunter-gatherer life caused Ik society to crumble. Food became ever scarcer. A low-level famine was ever-present, and this led to behaviour becoming ever more viciously individualistic. The family unit practically dissolved. The young and the old were not cared for. Anyone who could not feed him or herself was useless, already dead.
A TYPICAL ANECDOTE WHICH SETS THE TONE BUT WHICH YOU MAY CHOOSE TO DISBELIEVE
[Up to the age of three, the Ik child is ] carried about in a hide sling wherever the mother goes, and since the mother is not strong this is done grudgingly. … whenever the mother is at a water hole or in her fields she loosens the sling and lets the baby to the ground none too slowly, and of course laughs if it is hurt. I have seen Bila and Matsui do this many a time. Then she goes about her business, leaving the child there, almost hoping that some predator will come along and carry it off. This happened once while I was there – and the mother was delighted. She was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it… The men set off and found the leopard, which had consumed all of the child except part of the skull; they killed the leopard and cooked it and ate it, child and all.
ATUM’S WIFE DOES HIM A FAVOUR
Atum was an old Ik (i.e. over 40) who was very helpful to CT as he established himself in the village. One day he said his wife was sick. He asked CT for food and medicine for her, which CT gave him. After a while when she continued being sick CT suggested she should go to a hospital. Atum declined – “she was not that sick”.
Then after a while, when I still had not once seen her, his brother-in-law, the beady-eyed Lomongin, sidled up to me and said he supposed I knew that Atum was selling the medicine I was giving him for his wife. I was not unduly surprised, and merely remarked that that was too bad for his wife. “Oh no,” said Lomongin, enjoying the joke enormously, “she has been dead for weeks. He buried her inside the compound so you wouldn’t know.”
And later
I was told this was the best thing to do with old people who died. A funeral, it was said, was a nuisance to everyone, and made everyone upset with all the crying and wailing. I would have given quite a lot to believe that the Ik were capable of crying and wailing at that point.
And later, regarding another old man
In a very short time Loomeraniang was dead, and his son refused to come down from the village above and bury him; his sister hurried over and snatched his few belongings, leaving the corpse.
MORE TALES FROM HELL
caption on a photo
After eighteen years of age Ik women lose their ability to charm the cattle herders [who are a different tribe], and their fellow Ik have neither the energy nor the affection to spare. At eighteen a woman begins to enter the loneliness and isolation of old age.
Caption on another photo
Adupa, in the unused kitchen area of her compound, which was to become her grave. She made the mistake of thinking of it as a home. Her parents were unable to feed her, and when she persisted in her demands they shut her in. She was too weak to break her way out, and after a few days her dead body was unceremoniously thrown out.
Caption on another photo which shows a small boy and his taller brother
Liza, younger brother of Murai, died while his older brother thrived. He made the mistake of expecting more of family than mere tolerance. Murai would eat while his brother, starving, watched. Yet he showed no malice or hatred, no regret, nothing. As Murai said, surely, it is better that one lives than that they both should die.
CT remarks that in famine conditions
There simply was not room, in the life of these people, for such luxuries as family and sentiment and love. So close to the verge of starvation, such luxuries could mean death, and is it not a singularly foolish luxury to die for someone who is already dead, or weak, or old? This seemed to strike hard at the assumption that there are such things as basic human values, at the very notion of virtue, of goodness even.
The Ik present us with
an opportunity for testing the cherished notion that love is essential to survival. If it is, the Ik should have it. Whether it makes them or us any different from other animals is a matter of opinion, but I must confess that early during fieldwork I wrote back that I could not believe I was studying a human society ... I searched for evidence of love almost from the beginning, I found more of it in ... two baby leopards than I did among the Ik.
IS ANTHROPOLOGY A DIGNIFIED PROFESSION?
Of course the proper study of man is Man, man in this sense meaning woman too, of course, of course. But I dunno, the notion of a white intellectual paying the natives to build him a hut and a road to the hut so he can get his fucking Landrover up the hill, and living in this hut for a couple of years, and trying to learn all about this society, and then after this brief period trotting back to the University of Rich White America and writing down what he thinks about these poor benighted starvelings kind of sticks in my throat more than somewhat. And this particular book stuck in a lot of people’s craws, which made a lot of other people want to read it.
THERE WAS A VIOLENT REACTION TO THIS BOOK
One reviewer said
the author’s manner of presentation is distasteful and his general comments about the nature of man and society are both simplistic and questionable.
And
Rather than being a study of the Ik, this is an autobiographical portrait of the author utilizing the Ik as counters for expressing his personal feelings and experiences in the field. We are assured of the author's intrepidity (30), sensitivity (114), and given passages of embarrassingly purple prose (3o). Dr. Turnbull clearly had a dreadful field-trip and has succeeded in conveying this to the reader (Reviewer : T.O. BEIDELMAN)
Another colleague, Frederik Barth, entitled his review of The Mountain People “On Responsibility and Humanity: Calling a Colleague to Account”
and he said (I will quote him at length, it's good)
It is emotionally either dishonest or superficial. It is deeply misleading to the public it sets out to inform. Most disturbingly, it is grossly irresponsible and harmful to its unwitting objects of study.
To give a key to some of my indignation, let me illustrate how named Ik are exposed in the anthropologist's text. Their illegal activities are publicized to anyone who bothers to read the book: named persons are accused of cattle theft or fencing stolen cattle (p. 110); the location of corrals for such purposes is given (p. 278); photographs are provided showing named persons forging forbidden spears or engaged in illegal poaching {facing p. 128). Perhaps the anthropologist trusts that the authorities (referred to as "Obote's specially trained thugs," p. 108) will be ineffective in utilizing such information.
And
the face which the anthropologist presented to the Ik seems strongly marked by the Bwana complex. One of the clearest expressions is found in his relationship to Kauar, who emerges from the description (pp. 88-89) as a true Uncle Tom, who used to volunteer to make the long two-day walk into Kaabong and the even more tiring two-day climb back to get mail for me. ... He was always pleased with himself when he came back, and asked if he had made the trip more quickly than the last time. ... Then he used to sit and watch while I read the mail, studying the expression on my face to see if all was well. When we drank tea together he always took exactly the same number of teaspoons of sugar that I took, and helped himself to exactly the same number of biscuits, never more, never less.
When one day Kauar fell dead on his return marathon, Turnbull is indignant at the lack of compassion shown by the Ik, while "I still see his open, laughing face, see him giving precious tidbits to the children, comforting some child who was crying, and watching me read the letters he carried so lovingly for me. And I still think of him probably running up that viciously steep mountainside so that he could break his time record, and falling dead in his pathetic prime because he was starving" (p. 89).
GETTING IN TOUCH WITH YOUR INNER NAZI
Well, I have to agree with this reviewer from 1973. This whole thing begins to be nauseating after a while. CT portrays himself as a lover of Africa, and surely he did love parts of it, but the Ik freaked him out so much by their abjectness and squalor that the old judgemental colonial paternalism kind of rose up inside Colin and overwhelmed him, the old heart of darkness thing. He ends up saying that it would be better if the Ugandan government solved the Ik problem by forcibly rounding them up and dispersing them round the country in groups of ten or so. Since they no longer have any strong family bonds it would do them no harm. They could blend in with other tribes and that would be a final solution to the Ik problem.
What a book. I am most profoundly happy to be done with it.
Oh, and I don’t recommend it.
December 5, 2024
This account of what people will do in drought and famine is absolutely horrific, but of course these cases are often sensationalized into scientific-sounding generalizations about human nature.
April 27, 2024
Harrowing, interesting, lots to reflect on.
The reading of this book coincides with a trip to my hometown where I am here to supposedly ‘look after’ my relative post-hospital (they’re fine now). The main flavour of this book is a study of human culture/nature of a hunter/gather tribe in remote Uganda amid a famine. The judgemental side of me questions the timing of an assessment of previously undocumented (anthropologically) people. Can you factually say this is how people normally are when people around them are dying of hunger? So I take the observations with a grain of salt. The people are starving. So naturally, what was once moral or traditional is now a luxury unafforded. I get hangry after skipping one meal, so I can’t imagine the brain function after prolonged hunger. The anthropologist author describes cruelness, leaving the elderly (parents) to die, kicking kids out at 3 years old to join a kid’s group that hunt/gather together. And lots of antics: hiding food, eating raw so the smoke doesn’t attract scabs, gluttony over food storage, carry it in your stomach not on your head, don’t grow crops cos others will steal from it anyway. And so much more. It was an interesting read, but to me it was more a study of a famine situation than a particular tribe.
The author, though misguided in some ways (like me) has good intentions (like me). He has funds/supplies and he wants to help the most in need. But the healthier (relatively) people don’t like that. He cries when people just lie down to die while others strip their meagre possessions and laugh at them (the dead). He gives water to those begging for it. So he’s a nice guy.
Due to the timing of this read, I can’t help but think of the similarities between this tribe and…a relative of mine (won’t name them). But my relative is so short-term oriented it’s not funny. They take all now because they think they’ll be dead next week. They got help in hospital but was a real pain in the…cos they got their patch up and they just wanted to go out and continue being lazy and not do anything to reduce the chances of the next hospital visit. Like the author, I’ve tried to come in to save the day, and am about to leave with a pessimistic outlook.
So back to the book. An interesting read, lots to reflect on, you could pick it/me apart with some mentality issues, or you could take it for what it is and draw your own conclusions.
The reading of this book coincides with a trip to my hometown where I am here to supposedly ‘look after’ my relative post-hospital (they’re fine now). The main flavour of this book is a study of human culture/nature of a hunter/gather tribe in remote Uganda amid a famine. The judgemental side of me questions the timing of an assessment of previously undocumented (anthropologically) people. Can you factually say this is how people normally are when people around them are dying of hunger? So I take the observations with a grain of salt. The people are starving. So naturally, what was once moral or traditional is now a luxury unafforded. I get hangry after skipping one meal, so I can’t imagine the brain function after prolonged hunger. The anthropologist author describes cruelness, leaving the elderly (parents) to die, kicking kids out at 3 years old to join a kid’s group that hunt/gather together. And lots of antics: hiding food, eating raw so the smoke doesn’t attract scabs, gluttony over food storage, carry it in your stomach not on your head, don’t grow crops cos others will steal from it anyway. And so much more. It was an interesting read, but to me it was more a study of a famine situation than a particular tribe.
The author, though misguided in some ways (like me) has good intentions (like me). He has funds/supplies and he wants to help the most in need. But the healthier (relatively) people don’t like that. He cries when people just lie down to die while others strip their meagre possessions and laugh at them (the dead). He gives water to those begging for it. So he’s a nice guy.
Due to the timing of this read, I can’t help but think of the similarities between this tribe and…a relative of mine (won’t name them). But my relative is so short-term oriented it’s not funny. They take all now because they think they’ll be dead next week. They got help in hospital but was a real pain in the…cos they got their patch up and they just wanted to go out and continue being lazy and not do anything to reduce the chances of the next hospital visit. Like the author, I’ve tried to come in to save the day, and am about to leave with a pessimistic outlook.
So back to the book. An interesting read, lots to reflect on, you could pick it/me apart with some mentality issues, or you could take it for what it is and draw your own conclusions.
January 28, 2011
This was a pretty incredible account of how devastating the transition can be for a hunter-gatherer culture suddenly cut off from their subsistence base and forced into sedentary farming. In what amounted to two or three generations, the Ik lost so much. Turbull had a sound understanding of the typical hunter-gatherer lifeway and how the Ik's forced lifeway transition affected this, but his tone in the book fluctuated between empathy, loathing, hopelessness, and snide resignation.
I don't believe in objectivity, anthropological or otherwise, but sometimes I found myself reacting when Turnbull couldn't step back from his judgment and hatred of the Ik when he had never known the hunger and subsistence transition they were experiencing (something he acknowledged freely). Then again, I've never lived in a culture so far removed from my own cultural expectations and biases. I imagine that if I'd lived with the Ik for two years I might have had many of the same judgments, regardless of any intellectual understanding. Turnbull's experience among the Ik was a very human one, and I appreciated how honest he was about himself.
One of the parts I appreciated most about Turnbull's account was how he plainly drew parallels between the degeneration of Ik culture and modern industrialized culture. Without ranting or sensationalist language, he points out that the Ik throw their children out at three, whereas in modern America we wait until kindergarten, "divorcing" ourselves from them just as surely. The Ik self-interest that seems so despicable to a romanticized view of human virtue is simply a mirror of our own self-absorption, just without the capitalist and technological trappings.
One of my favorite lines:
"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 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 very existence of which is a violence."
This was an incredibly powerful (if depressing) read, and I'm glad that I had the opportunity.
I don't believe in objectivity, anthropological or otherwise, but sometimes I found myself reacting when Turnbull couldn't step back from his judgment and hatred of the Ik when he had never known the hunger and subsistence transition they were experiencing (something he acknowledged freely). Then again, I've never lived in a culture so far removed from my own cultural expectations and biases. I imagine that if I'd lived with the Ik for two years I might have had many of the same judgments, regardless of any intellectual understanding. Turnbull's experience among the Ik was a very human one, and I appreciated how honest he was about himself.
One of the parts I appreciated most about Turnbull's account was how he plainly drew parallels between the degeneration of Ik culture and modern industrialized culture. Without ranting or sensationalist language, he points out that the Ik throw their children out at three, whereas in modern America we wait until kindergarten, "divorcing" ourselves from them just as surely. The Ik self-interest that seems so despicable to a romanticized view of human virtue is simply a mirror of our own self-absorption, just without the capitalist and technological trappings.
One of my favorite lines:
"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 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 very existence of which is a violence."
This was an incredibly powerful (if depressing) read, and I'm glad that I had the opportunity.
December 28, 2008
This is a very strange anthropological study of the Ik people in Uganda, based on field work done by Turnbull in the mid 60’s. The Ik apparently lost all their humanity when faced with starvation and horrible conditions of living. The examples of what most people would call pure cruelty are many, letting old relatives die, taking food from others and practising ruthless egoism to name a few. But to me it does not really seem that strange, of course the Ik are unfriendly to Turnbull when they know that he has the extreme advantage of material wealth, sitting in his Land Rover while eating and sleeping, protected from the others.
What strikes me with this account is that it is to a large degree rather modern as an anthropological account in that Turnbull criticises his own work. But on the other hand there are a lot of comparisons made to animal behaviour, especially primates, that is reminiscent of the worst kind of anthropological works from the 1900th century. For example he once wrote a letter back home comparing the Ik to a “singularly well-ordered community of baboons” (p. 236). This goes as far as Turnbull hoping for their complete isolation so they as a group can die out completely, a very crude remark in my eyes. To his defence one might note that he really sees this development as something coming out of the biological need to survive (in his theory by abandoning the hunting and gathering for mainly agriculture due to displacement by the government), not particularly evoking any racial traits or issues.
Interestingly enough he uses the last chapter of the book to criticise the modern “Western” world with its obsession with technology and luxury items. Urging for change so as not to end up as the Ik did, in Turnbull’s view, like incurable egoists and individualists doomed to extinction. It is very well written and easy to read and I would recommend it to any anthropologist or sociologists, mostly because its rather extreme and controversial content.
What strikes me with this account is that it is to a large degree rather modern as an anthropological account in that Turnbull criticises his own work. But on the other hand there are a lot of comparisons made to animal behaviour, especially primates, that is reminiscent of the worst kind of anthropological works from the 1900th century. For example he once wrote a letter back home comparing the Ik to a “singularly well-ordered community of baboons” (p. 236). This goes as far as Turnbull hoping for their complete isolation so they as a group can die out completely, a very crude remark in my eyes. To his defence one might note that he really sees this development as something coming out of the biological need to survive (in his theory by abandoning the hunting and gathering for mainly agriculture due to displacement by the government), not particularly evoking any racial traits or issues.
Interestingly enough he uses the last chapter of the book to criticise the modern “Western” world with its obsession with technology and luxury items. Urging for change so as not to end up as the Ik did, in Turnbull’s view, like incurable egoists and individualists doomed to extinction. It is very well written and easy to read and I would recommend it to any anthropologist or sociologists, mostly because its rather extreme and controversial content.
June 29, 2007
This is a book I've come back to every few years because it's controversial, depressing, and Turnbull's conclusion was rightly admonished. Basically, it's about the Ik people of Africa a few decades ago and their survival in a remote place with little resources. Everyone's starving. Turnbull is trying to make some case involving the concept of altruism and how it clearly doesn't exist among these people, and really would it be so bad if they died out? An abominable idea of course, and he paints a society where the old are shunned and left to die (after all, they shouldn't be eating valuable food). Children are kicked out of the home at an early age to fend for themselves and people don't think twice about inducing another to vomit to steal their food. Horrendous, right? But cultural relativism, if you believe in it, requires that we try to understand all contexts.
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
November 13, 2017
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!
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!
October 12, 2020
"'Don't you know,' said Dahoud, 'that life is the most precious possession you have?'
'Ho, ho,' said Ploy through his tears. 'Why?'
'Because,' said Dahoud, 'without it, you'd be dead."- V., Thomas Pynchon
An unsuccessful field study that nevertheless provides a strangely revealing anthropological account of life during famine, while also being a reckoning on the field of anthropology itself.
If I, a layman, were asked to give a definition of anthropology without the assistance of a dictionary it would sound something along the lines of, “The study of lived experience to provide evidence of humanity’s empirical kernel through it’s myriad disparities and forms.” Anthropology’s goal reads to me as finding the moment our intellect started its initial tear from nature. Did such a thing even happen, or is ogling and despairing over the detriments of human detritus more anthropocentrism?
The Mountain People both centers that question, and makes it absolutely irrelevant. From the very beginning of Colin Turnbull’s time on the northeastern Ugandan mountains he is given Scooby-Doo-like warnings and turnarounds. He receives warnings from the lowland townies, his guides try to get him lost on a path leading back to where they came, the journey up to the mountains takes days to trek (which he said he prepared for by walking everyday to and fro his Downtown Manhattan office and his Upper West Side apartment, lol). When he finally arrives his guide, who grew up amongst the Ik and hasn’t seen the Mountain community in some two years, is immediately asked for food and is otherwise paid no mind or interest. Very quickly we learn of the anomie of the Ik on the verge of famine. The Ugandan government (read: de facto British imperial government) turned the Ik land into a park to protect the wildlife, only allowing hunting with a permit for recreation only. This is of course bullshit, especially (I can’t remember if this is a paraphrase from Turnbull or elsewhere) because hunter-gatherer communities are experts at giving and taking just enough to sustain themselves and for their local ecologies to thrive.
When the famine set in Turnbull saw a side of people that is rarely seen, and is even more scarcely documented. Apart from a unique language, Turnbull comments that the one one thing holding the Ik together was food.
“The very word for “good”, marang, is defined in terms of food. “Goodness,” marangik, is defined simply as “food,” or, if you press, this will be clarified as “the possession of food,” and still further clarified as “individual possession of food.”
There is still the classical foundation of economics, debt:
“There are other measures that can be taken for survival involving the classical institutions of gift and sacrifice. These are not expressions of the foolish belief that altruism is both possible and desirable; they are weapons, sharp and aggressive, which can be put to divers [sic.] uses. But the purpose for which the gift is designed can be thwarted by the non-acceptance of it, and much of Icien ingenuity goes into thwarting the would be thwarter. The object, of course, is to build up a whole series of obligations so that in times of crisis you have a number of debts you can recall, and with luck onf of them may be repaid.”
This still rings true with the Graeberian conception of debt as faith. But faith takes on a different meaning here, and in so doing reveals the home of a latent optimism implicit in the concept. Though I do suppose, maybe, that ‘faith’ is uniquely human, if only in it being a last vestige of our natural embeddedness in the will of the world.
In any case, what I understand as being the locus point for the strong reaction against this book are the anecdotes of antisocial horror. There are many Ik folk Turnbull encounters who he sees die--whose deaths are entirely preventable yet he is completely powerless to intervene. He tries to share the food that he alone is guaranteed, but it’s never enough for anyone. He shares with the weakest, and the less weak end up stealing it. He watches wives loot the near-death bodies of husbands that have not the means to convalesce. He watches parents lock their dying children up in their houses, leaving them for dead because their whining and need for precious resources is nothing more than a nuisance to them. The reality is, of course, no, the Ik are not like this! These are exigent circumstances that even the most severe poverty in advanced capitalism has little or no analog. So in this case the project as an anthropological study is a failure, but what we see instead is...gosh, I don’t know…
“The Ik teach us that our much vaunted human values are not inherent in humanity at all, but are associated only with a particular form of survival called society, and that all, even society itself, are luxuries that can be dispensed with. That if man has any greatness it is surely in his ability to maintain these values, clinging to them to an often very bitter end, even shortening an already pitifully short life rather than sacrificing his humanity. But that too involves choice, and the Ik each us that man can lose the will to make it. That is the point at which there is an end to truth, to goodness and to beauty, an end to the struggle for their achievement, which gives life to the individual while at the same time giving strength and meaning to society. The Ik have relinquished all luxury in the name of individual survival, and the result is that they live on as a people without life, without passion, beyond humanity. 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.”
'Ho, ho,' said Ploy through his tears. 'Why?'
'Because,' said Dahoud, 'without it, you'd be dead."- V., Thomas Pynchon
An unsuccessful field study that nevertheless provides a strangely revealing anthropological account of life during famine, while also being a reckoning on the field of anthropology itself.
If I, a layman, were asked to give a definition of anthropology without the assistance of a dictionary it would sound something along the lines of, “The study of lived experience to provide evidence of humanity’s empirical kernel through it’s myriad disparities and forms.” Anthropology’s goal reads to me as finding the moment our intellect started its initial tear from nature. Did such a thing even happen, or is ogling and despairing over the detriments of human detritus more anthropocentrism?
The Mountain People both centers that question, and makes it absolutely irrelevant. From the very beginning of Colin Turnbull’s time on the northeastern Ugandan mountains he is given Scooby-Doo-like warnings and turnarounds. He receives warnings from the lowland townies, his guides try to get him lost on a path leading back to where they came, the journey up to the mountains takes days to trek (which he said he prepared for by walking everyday to and fro his Downtown Manhattan office and his Upper West Side apartment, lol). When he finally arrives his guide, who grew up amongst the Ik and hasn’t seen the Mountain community in some two years, is immediately asked for food and is otherwise paid no mind or interest. Very quickly we learn of the anomie of the Ik on the verge of famine. The Ugandan government (read: de facto British imperial government) turned the Ik land into a park to protect the wildlife, only allowing hunting with a permit for recreation only. This is of course bullshit, especially (I can’t remember if this is a paraphrase from Turnbull or elsewhere) because hunter-gatherer communities are experts at giving and taking just enough to sustain themselves and for their local ecologies to thrive.
When the famine set in Turnbull saw a side of people that is rarely seen, and is even more scarcely documented. Apart from a unique language, Turnbull comments that the one one thing holding the Ik together was food.
“The very word for “good”, marang, is defined in terms of food. “Goodness,” marangik, is defined simply as “food,” or, if you press, this will be clarified as “the possession of food,” and still further clarified as “individual possession of food.”
There is still the classical foundation of economics, debt:
“There are other measures that can be taken for survival involving the classical institutions of gift and sacrifice. These are not expressions of the foolish belief that altruism is both possible and desirable; they are weapons, sharp and aggressive, which can be put to divers [sic.] uses. But the purpose for which the gift is designed can be thwarted by the non-acceptance of it, and much of Icien ingenuity goes into thwarting the would be thwarter. The object, of course, is to build up a whole series of obligations so that in times of crisis you have a number of debts you can recall, and with luck onf of them may be repaid.”
This still rings true with the Graeberian conception of debt as faith. But faith takes on a different meaning here, and in so doing reveals the home of a latent optimism implicit in the concept. Though I do suppose, maybe, that ‘faith’ is uniquely human, if only in it being a last vestige of our natural embeddedness in the will of the world.
In any case, what I understand as being the locus point for the strong reaction against this book are the anecdotes of antisocial horror. There are many Ik folk Turnbull encounters who he sees die--whose deaths are entirely preventable yet he is completely powerless to intervene. He tries to share the food that he alone is guaranteed, but it’s never enough for anyone. He shares with the weakest, and the less weak end up stealing it. He watches wives loot the near-death bodies of husbands that have not the means to convalesce. He watches parents lock their dying children up in their houses, leaving them for dead because their whining and need for precious resources is nothing more than a nuisance to them. The reality is, of course, no, the Ik are not like this! These are exigent circumstances that even the most severe poverty in advanced capitalism has little or no analog. So in this case the project as an anthropological study is a failure, but what we see instead is...gosh, I don’t know…
“The Ik teach us that our much vaunted human values are not inherent in humanity at all, but are associated only with a particular form of survival called society, and that all, even society itself, are luxuries that can be dispensed with. That if man has any greatness it is surely in his ability to maintain these values, clinging to them to an often very bitter end, even shortening an already pitifully short life rather than sacrificing his humanity. But that too involves choice, and the Ik each us that man can lose the will to make it. That is the point at which there is an end to truth, to goodness and to beauty, an end to the struggle for their achievement, which gives life to the individual while at the same time giving strength and meaning to society. The Ik have relinquished all luxury in the name of individual survival, and the result is that they live on as a people without life, without passion, beyond humanity. 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.”
October 29, 2008
An amazing book. Turnbull stayed for two years with the Ik, an African tribe in which individualism and mutual exploitation have replaced love, compassion, and family. Women laugh as their babies crawl into the fire. Children pummel their starving grandparents and steal the food (literally) from their mouths. It all calls into question if humanity has any basic quality of goodness.
The book is also the story of an anthropologist's capacity for objectivity imploding. Toward the end are lines like this: "I am hopeful that their isolation will remain as complete as in the past, until they die out completely." Readers will, and probably should, hedge their bets a little more. But while I've read refutations of the book, none of them are quite convincing at dispelling its heart--a portrait of humanity scraped clean of anything but craven self-interest.
The book is also the story of an anthropologist's capacity for objectivity imploding. Toward the end are lines like this: "I am hopeful that their isolation will remain as complete as in the past, until they die out completely." Readers will, and probably should, hedge their bets a little more. But while I've read refutations of the book, none of them are quite convincing at dispelling its heart--a portrait of humanity scraped clean of anything but craven self-interest.
May 9, 2023
Constant hunger, from environmental issues combined with restricted grounds to roam, and a dependence on Government handouts leads to a degradation of morals and a slow collapse of society and family.
This story shares similarities with what happened in the countryside of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Communities turned on each other and family in a quest for anything remotely edible. Sometimes the only relief was to steal/take from your own or make up crimes to justify getting the Government to reward you or allow you and others to strip someone of all their possessions and food.
Hunger turns people into animals.
This story shares similarities with what happened in the countryside of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Communities turned on each other and family in a quest for anything remotely edible. Sometimes the only relief was to steal/take from your own or make up crimes to justify getting the Government to reward you or allow you and others to strip someone of all their possessions and food.
Hunger turns people into animals.
January 10, 2011
The Mountain People
By: Colin Turnbull
This book was recommended to me by one of my graduate school professors. After reading it, I never acquired a chance to have a conversation with him about this book. Based on the fact that he is an African American PhD tenured professor of many subjects, one of which includes the study of sociolinguistics, I imagine he would have told me to “connect the dots.” He would probably want me to see the relationship, or the similarities of the Ik people to the African American people. And if this is what he would’ve said, then I would’ve replied, “This is an extreme comparison. Don’t you think?” And I am not sure of where the conversation would’ve gone from that point.
One of my main issues with this book, The Mountain People is the author himself. For the sake of not beating a half-dead horse, I will not make this about race. Instead, I will discuss my issues from a nationalistic perspective. Colin Turnbull is a pretty good writer, as he should be, considering he was educated at The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, one of Britain's most expensive independent schools. So I have one word for him: PRIVILEGED. I don’t resent privilege. I look at it as a matter of the cards you were dealt in life, so to speak; which leads me to my irritancy of Turnbull’s observation of the Ik people.
The Ik a.k.a The Mountain People are of an African Tribe consisting of prosperous hunters who once lived well and were happy. They were eventually deracinated from their original home up in the mountains where they lived peacefully and felt “closer to God.” Then, along comes the conquerors, people ordered by the Ugandan government to cast them out of their land and homes, obviously by ruthless force, and sent them down into the valley low to survive on their own. The conquerors did this to preserve the Ik’s (which is not even their original name) mountain home as a tourist site. I guess they didn’t want the tourists to freak out and see the people inhabiting the area. This is, of course, very wrong and horrible.
So when Turnbull decides to give them a visit, he catches them at a rough time in their lives. His commentary throughout the book annoys me. He’s all “Oooh, the Ik’s made poo poo on the edge of the descent into Kidepo. Omg, the smell. THE SMELL!” And not just that, but he painted a picture of them as heartless, mindless savages while asking himself if it would be better if they just “die off.” He also complained about them being “difficult.” I would like to know how he would feel, cope, and survive if he was taken from his home and sent out to live in the forest somewhere with no money and food, having everything ripped away from him including his concept of God? There were times throughout the book where I felt this was the core problem with the Ik and their mental state, that they felt disconnected and forsaken by God.
At the end, Turnbull gives his obligatory, self-redemption speech stating something along the lines of the Ik teaching “us,” (“us” being blessed Americans, I presume) that “our human values are not inherent in humanity but are associated with our survival in society. And that our society itself is a luxury. “Then he goes on to explain (which I’m sure his editor made him do this) that “this lack of a luxury society experienced by the Ik’s and their behavior thereof does not make them any less wonderful or desirable. The Ik teaches us that man can lose the will to make it in such extreme unpleasant conditions.” And so on…
But I wanted to know what happened next. Turnbull visited the Ik, lived amongst them, did his little ethnographical/ anthropological study and wrote a book no doubt making money from his “discovery.” What did the Ik get from all of this observation?
By: Colin Turnbull
This book was recommended to me by one of my graduate school professors. After reading it, I never acquired a chance to have a conversation with him about this book. Based on the fact that he is an African American PhD tenured professor of many subjects, one of which includes the study of sociolinguistics, I imagine he would have told me to “connect the dots.” He would probably want me to see the relationship, or the similarities of the Ik people to the African American people. And if this is what he would’ve said, then I would’ve replied, “This is an extreme comparison. Don’t you think?” And I am not sure of where the conversation would’ve gone from that point.
One of my main issues with this book, The Mountain People is the author himself. For the sake of not beating a half-dead horse, I will not make this about race. Instead, I will discuss my issues from a nationalistic perspective. Colin Turnbull is a pretty good writer, as he should be, considering he was educated at The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, one of Britain's most expensive independent schools. So I have one word for him: PRIVILEGED. I don’t resent privilege. I look at it as a matter of the cards you were dealt in life, so to speak; which leads me to my irritancy of Turnbull’s observation of the Ik people.
The Ik a.k.a The Mountain People are of an African Tribe consisting of prosperous hunters who once lived well and were happy. They were eventually deracinated from their original home up in the mountains where they lived peacefully and felt “closer to God.” Then, along comes the conquerors, people ordered by the Ugandan government to cast them out of their land and homes, obviously by ruthless force, and sent them down into the valley low to survive on their own. The conquerors did this to preserve the Ik’s (which is not even their original name) mountain home as a tourist site. I guess they didn’t want the tourists to freak out and see the people inhabiting the area. This is, of course, very wrong and horrible.
So when Turnbull decides to give them a visit, he catches them at a rough time in their lives. His commentary throughout the book annoys me. He’s all “Oooh, the Ik’s made poo poo on the edge of the descent into Kidepo. Omg, the smell. THE SMELL!” And not just that, but he painted a picture of them as heartless, mindless savages while asking himself if it would be better if they just “die off.” He also complained about them being “difficult.” I would like to know how he would feel, cope, and survive if he was taken from his home and sent out to live in the forest somewhere with no money and food, having everything ripped away from him including his concept of God? There were times throughout the book where I felt this was the core problem with the Ik and their mental state, that they felt disconnected and forsaken by God.
At the end, Turnbull gives his obligatory, self-redemption speech stating something along the lines of the Ik teaching “us,” (“us” being blessed Americans, I presume) that “our human values are not inherent in humanity but are associated with our survival in society. And that our society itself is a luxury. “Then he goes on to explain (which I’m sure his editor made him do this) that “this lack of a luxury society experienced by the Ik’s and their behavior thereof does not make them any less wonderful or desirable. The Ik teaches us that man can lose the will to make it in such extreme unpleasant conditions.” And so on…
But I wanted to know what happened next. Turnbull visited the Ik, lived amongst them, did his little ethnographical/ anthropological study and wrote a book no doubt making money from his “discovery.” What did the Ik get from all of this observation?
February 23, 2019
I think when I look at the actions of the ik in the 1960's and I compare them to Americans today, I dont see much difference. In regards to selfish behavior, and we aren't even starving. All I see now days is scumbag after scumbag, justifying his crappy behavior by pointing his finger at a bigger scumbag.
About the book, first I want to say, that I realize this book was the subject of some controversy after it was published. People saying that he really didn't have a grasp on the language and he got it all wrong, and he was there during a time of famine. To this I say, "Of coarse... duh..." First of all, he lived with these people for 3 years, and was picking up on this kind of behavior since day 1, so give me a break already. As for the language, you can just go ahead and miss me with that point too, all I got to say to that is "3 years". The famine thing? Nice try, of corse it was durng a famine, that's what the book is about and basicly his entire point. So sure, ill give you that one, and your point is????
Without giving away too much, this book is about an African tribe of hunters, that were told by the government that they weren't allowed to hunt anymore. So the were soon starving and resorted to some pretty skantless behavior. A very good book and a must read for anyone that thinks they know what they are capable of when faced with starvation. Im not talking about "hunger", I mean "starvation". As in no food for about a week and if you dont get something in your belly in a few hours, your done for, and when your tribe mates see that, they become a bunch of sharks that smell blood in the water.
A great book that brings up a lot of points about humanity and its limitations, and what it really is that makes us "human" and what that really means. Id recommend it to anyone, and everyone.
About the book, first I want to say, that I realize this book was the subject of some controversy after it was published. People saying that he really didn't have a grasp on the language and he got it all wrong, and he was there during a time of famine. To this I say, "Of coarse... duh..." First of all, he lived with these people for 3 years, and was picking up on this kind of behavior since day 1, so give me a break already. As for the language, you can just go ahead and miss me with that point too, all I got to say to that is "3 years". The famine thing? Nice try, of corse it was durng a famine, that's what the book is about and basicly his entire point. So sure, ill give you that one, and your point is????
Without giving away too much, this book is about an African tribe of hunters, that were told by the government that they weren't allowed to hunt anymore. So the were soon starving and resorted to some pretty skantless behavior. A very good book and a must read for anyone that thinks they know what they are capable of when faced with starvation. Im not talking about "hunger", I mean "starvation". As in no food for about a week and if you dont get something in your belly in a few hours, your done for, and when your tribe mates see that, they become a bunch of sharks that smell blood in the water.
A great book that brings up a lot of points about humanity and its limitations, and what it really is that makes us "human" and what that really means. Id recommend it to anyone, and everyone.
December 7, 2020
This book literally took me years to read. I would pick it up, read a chapter, then put it down because it was so terrifyingly depressing. It's not fiction, either. This book was written by an anthropoligist who studied a tribe, aptly called the Ik, in eastern Africa. The Ik were hunter gatherers, and they were forced off their territory as western civilization took over. They began to starve and their entire society crumbled. It was every man for themselves. They abandoned their children by age three, they left their partners and parents to die as they laughed and stole food right out of their mouths. They devolved into a very loose group of individuals who had no sense of good or bad, love or hate, or sense of religion. To say they were like animals would be an insult to animals. As the book wraps up, startling parallels are drawn to our own society. We are all only a step away from being like the Ik.
May 19, 2016
This is another one of those books that I can see other people enjoying, but me, not so much. It had its moments. The base point of the book is pretty terrible. The way of life that these people have adapted to his horrible. When you're relieved that a hyena has run off with your baby, life sucks. It's an saddening and maddening book. I just didn't like the way the author went about telling the story. This book could have been very interesting and intense. but the matter of fact writing style just kind of took the intensity out of it. Not a bad book, just thought that considering the subject matter it could have been so much better.
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July 27, 2019It is a terrible book -- not because of the way that it is written, but because of its contents. The author, an anthropologist, describes an isolated tribe called Ik who lived in the mountains of central Africa. The tribe had lived on the verge of starvation for several generations, and by the time of his study had lost any semblance of what we would call humanity. As a result of his time among the Ik, Turnbull draws an interesting philosophical conclusion: that morality is a luxury that we can afford only in relatively affluent times, but when our individual survival is threatened, it is a luxury which we cannot afford.
December 28, 2007
A grim book about a tribe undergoing extinction. A vision of the social Hell humankind is capable of creating when resources are scarce. One of the most depressing but most memorable nonfiction books you will ever read.
May 5, 2012
An excellent glimpse into the true nature of human society. Read this book for education not entertainment - it is dry in some parts. Provides evidence that there are no such thing as intrinsic human values and that the nature of people and society depends greatly on the environment.
May 4, 2022
I read this book as part of a Sociology class when I was in college. Even though I read it almost 50 years ago, this book and the tragic story that it describes still haunts me. Is culture so thin and fragile that difficulties, pain, and struggle can utterly destroy our humanity? I'd like to believe that this story is an anomaly but I think it reveals a truth about the human condition that our society of consumption blinds us to... we are all one disaster away from only valuing only our own survival. This book reminds me of the importance of building values that go deeper than culture and nurturing a sustainable community. This book will shock and challenge those of us who are complacent and challenge us to protect the social safety net, the rule of just laws, and a recognition of the fragility of humanity.
May 2, 2020
"The Ik had faced a conscious choice between being human and being parasites, and of course had chosen the latter."
This book, I hate it but know enough Karamojung culture to believe parts of it. I know that the Ik are still a tribe so not all of the author's predictions are true. I really hope he just didn't have a good enough grasp of the language.
"Luckily the Ik are not numerous-about two thousand- and those two years reduced their numbers greatly. So I'm hopeful that their isolation will remain as complete as in the past, until they die out completely. " What kind of anthropologist can write that?! He refers to them as inhuman. I just can't....
This book, I hate it but know enough Karamojung culture to believe parts of it. I know that the Ik are still a tribe so not all of the author's predictions are true. I really hope he just didn't have a good enough grasp of the language.
"Luckily the Ik are not numerous-about two thousand- and those two years reduced their numbers greatly. So I'm hopeful that their isolation will remain as complete as in the past, until they die out completely. " What kind of anthropologist can write that?! He refers to them as inhuman. I just can't....
May 16, 2025
I have a side interest in anthropology, especially field work stories. I haven’t read all that many, but I am fascinated. I am partial to fieldwork gone wrong, where the anthropologist clashes with his subjects of study. It can provide some very uncomfortable insights, into self and/or into the human species, and though I shouldn’t say I like uncomfortable insights, I find them interesting.
This book is a little old and a little boring, it is awful in its description of a people/society having fallen apart (due to colonial then national policies, to starvation, etc) so completely. But brutal honesty has its qualities.
This book is a little old and a little boring, it is awful in its description of a people/society having fallen apart (due to colonial then national policies, to starvation, etc) so completely. But brutal honesty has its qualities.
November 22, 2017
Forbidden to hunt in their former lands that have now become a game park, the people described in this book seem to have little humanity left. The author gradually helps us to understand how they came to be so heartless and uncaring. A brilliant depiction of how people are made into monsters by circumstances. When facing starvation parents steal food from their children and from their elderly parents. The quote that stayed with me "Why do the government care so much about the animals, but not about us?"
September 25, 2023
I read Colin M. Turnbull's The Forest People and thought, "This is how humans were meant to live". The Mountain People demonstrates just what happens to people when a people's way of life is destroyed and all that is left is the will to survive: loneliness, selfishness, deceit, and exploitation. Affection becomes a waste of energy and love is foolish vulnerability.
Mountain People is a reflection of civilized humanity.
Mountain People is a reflection of civilized humanity.
January 9, 2024
Definitely not a light or easy breezy read, even though it is not a long book.
I feel like I read too fast to fully understand everything that the author was trying to say with his essays and thoughts on these people.
I can see why this was not more popular or talked about, it is quite disturbing to think of living in these situations or watching on in the role of and anthropologist.
Might possibly read again to understand a little bit better everything that this book is about.
I feel like I read too fast to fully understand everything that the author was trying to say with his essays and thoughts on these people.
I can see why this was not more popular or talked about, it is quite disturbing to think of living in these situations or watching on in the role of and anthropologist.
Might possibly read again to understand a little bit better everything that this book is about.
November 13, 2017
Turnbull's lack of sympathy for the people he is studying and his collusion with the "administration" (as well as his surprising lack of introspection and analysis of the root causes of the Ik's suffering) made this a very difficult read. I find his conclusions about the Ik just as inhumane as the society he is supposedly describing.
June 30, 2024
I don't know if the author was racist or unnecessarily cruel regarding the culture of the Ik but he was definitely heavily traumatized by his experience.
I would however like to read some of the stories from actual tribe members even if it was an anthology rather than something more in depth about the culture in and of itself.
I would however like to read some of the stories from actual tribe members even if it was an anthology rather than something more in depth about the culture in and of itself.
November 2, 2021
I’ve hiked Mount Morungole… that aside, this is sensationalised, racist and reductionist. It gives a glimpse but completely self reflected into Turnbull’s eyes. Glad I read it to be honest but … wow.
December 4, 2017
Another view of another kind of life, actually strife. Another testimony to the resilience of man.
March 18, 2020
Read for ANTH 3004
August 6, 2021
I’m on an indigenous people streak lately👍
December 15, 2024
If it's true, it's all too terrible.
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