The Forest People by Colin Turnbull

One of the admirable features of writing is that it creates an new kind of time, in which the writer may interrupt her or his task and return to it as though no break at all had occurred, and in which a writer may communicate as though directly to a reader separated from her or him by many years.

Colin Turnbull's The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (New York: Simon and Schuster Touchstone, 1962) is my next selection. I suppose after the Bible any book may seem a bit of a let-down; I think I had originally meant to follow with the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching, but then these might have seemed "lesser", which I would not have intended. So, something else entirely.

Turnbull's work with the BaMbuti or "Pygmies", as he denominates them, was not met entirely with approval by the academic community. Turnbull was too strongly sympathetic towards his subjects to have the proper objectivity: that I think was the main objection. In this, Turnbull was like some other notable anthropologists such as Napoleon Chagnon and Alfred Louis Kroeber.

Be that as it may, Turnbull's book is a delight to read, and certainly inspired me to pursue anthropology.

The Forest People describes Turnbull's experiences in the Congo Basin in the late 1950s. He narrates his interactions with the "Negroes" and the "Pygmies" as well as with colonial Europeans (for most of Turnbull's travels were in what was then the Belgian Congo). He describes the life of the village-dwelling agriculturalists as squalid and miserable compared to the freedom and pleasure of the forest-dwelling Pygmies. Turnbull creates a vivid mental landscape for the reader in which the scents, sights, and sounds of the forest seem both real and comforting.

I first read The Forest People when I was a freshman in college. My friend Bryan Byrne was tremendously enthusiastic about the work, and his enthusiasm was infectious. What we could bring of the book into our own lives was chiefly the idea of the dream world, although I think our practice of "piano banging", which was a kind of communal percussion session using the pianos provided by the college in the lounge areas of the college, probably had some inspiration in Turnbull's writings.

My most recent immersion in the work was a year ago, while I was studying twentieth-century Africa under Onek Adyanga. I read Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost as one of the required course texts, but "at the same time" I was reading Turnbull aloud to my housemate Erika. Turnbull's descriptions of the forest again captured my interest and I found myself poring over Google Earth, looking for the places mentioned in the text. Alas, the resolution in Google Earth for that part of the world is poor, and the clouds which inevitably form over the forest further obscure the land. I suppose there is nothing for it but to travel there myself.

For me, the reading of The Forest People is reminiscent of the works of Jane Goodall, and I think in some ways Goodall's and Turnbull's attitudes and conclusions were similar. That may sound as though their subjects (chimpanzees and Pygmies) have strong similarities, and I'm not sure that it is a disservice to either to say that that may be so.