Colin Turnbull

Colin Macmillan TUrnbull he was a famous anthropologist that dedicated his life and attention to the forest people, he worked in the field of ethnomusicology, that is the study of the different musics of the different countries in the world. Colin Turnbull he was born in London ad educated in Westminster School later he went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, there he study politics and philosophy. Later he was awarded to the university of India because he volunteered at the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, where there he got a master in the Indian Religion and Philosophy. later on in his life he then gradated from Banaras Hindu university in India. after his graduation he travels thru India with an Ohio school teacher he had meet, and starting studying the Bam Buti during this time period. Dr. Turnbull was particularly known for two starkly contrasting books based on fieldwork in Africa. One, "The Forest People" , is mainly about a group of pygmy hunters and gatherers in what is now Zaire. He depicted them as having made a skilled adjustment to a not-so-arduous forest existence, a happy people with a remarkably free and fair society.

When the book appeared, it was lauded, and it has become a standard anthropological text. The other book, "The Mountain People" is a shocking portrait of the Ik, a hapless and dwindling hunting people in northern Uganda. The Ik had been deprived of their hunting grounds and had come to lead a demoralized, dog-eat-dog life on the edge of starvation. The book became a best seller and was praised as a powerful depiction of evil. His other books include "The Human Cycle" which is about the ways in which different cultures organize the main phases of a person's life, from childhood to old age.