Forest People" by Colin Turnbull

¶ … Forest People" by Colin Turnbull The Anthropological Experience in mid-20th century: Personal narrative and ethnographic discussion in "The Forest People" by Colin Turnbull In the book, "The Forest People," author Colin Turnbull presents his own narrative and ethnographic account of the BaMbuti, 'people of the forest,' located in Congo, Africa, specifically in Ituri Forest. What the author attempts to convey in his book is that there is a new perspective that will be learned in studying the ways and lifestyles of the BaMbuti.

As the author asserts initially in the book, "...the study of man should be approached not necessarily without emotion but with careful, scientific impartiality," which reflects the general notion of how anthropological, specifically exploratory studies, should be conducted, analyzed, and interpreted. Indeed, many social scientists like Turnbull had attempted to depict an accurate and objective picture of what life in Eastern and Middle Eastern nations is, determined through scientific methods.

By scientific method, this means that the procedures in which anthropological accounts were recounted were through systematic and objective thinking and analysis on the part of the researcher/anthropologist. Thus, during Turnbull's time, qualitative studies have become prevalent because the qualitative paradigm offered more avenues and opportunities for new discoveries to be generated in exploratory studies conducted in nations and societies in the African and Asian regions, among others.

Given this historical background of the nature of anthropological studies during the mid-20th century, it is evident that Turnbull's ethnographic study of the BaMbuti is just one among the numerous studies by Western social scientists in their attempt to understand the lives of various societies extant in this world with 'scientific impartiality.' Throughout the book, Turnbull had present life in the Ituri Forest in the same manner as other anthropologists have depicted 'new and foreign' cultures for them.

What perhaps differentiates the author's ethnographic account is that towards the end of the book, he puts BaMbuti life in the context of the rapid industrialization taking over the region, what with the preponderance of plantations that radically altered the life of the tribe, which had been predominated by nature and its living organisms. The first chapters of the book provided useful insights about the life of the BaMbuti, whom Turnbull referred to generally as Pygmies.

In his initial discussions of tribal life, he explicitly stated the difference in the perspectives of the Pygmies from those of the outsiders: Many people who have visited the Ituri since, and many who have lived there, feel just the same, overpowered by the heaviness of everything.. And above all, such people feel overpowered by the seeming silence and the age-old remoteness and loneliness of it all. But these are the feelings of outsiders, of those who do not belong to the forest.

If you are of the forest it is a very different place.

What seems to other people to be eternal and depressing gloom becomes a cool, restful, shady world From this passage, the author makes his readers realize that if observed from the point-of-view of the forest people, or even to just adapt to a different kind of perspective, forest life in Ituri will be considered as a whole new different culture, definitely not one that is inferior to the cultures of modern life most societies live in the 20th century.

This passage also reveals Turnbull's thrust, wherein he attempts to illustrate the same point throughout his analysis and discussion of life among the forest people. The author also had early on established the conflict between the lives of the BaMbuti and modernization. The creation and development of plantations, from the point-of-view of non-forest people, is a mark of progress, and delineated distinctly the difference between civilized lives to forest life.

However, what the villagers do not realize, according to Turnbull, is that despite the relative 'inferiority' of forest life among the BaMbuti, they live in harmony with forest and Nature in general. To him, "[t]he BaMbuti are the real people of the forest...the Pygmies have been in the forest for many thousands of years....They do not have to cut the forest down to build plantations, for they know how to hunt the game of the region..." (13-4).

This description brings into light the mutual relationship between the Pygmies and the forest, a relationship that has not been cultivated and often taken for granted by the villagers who live in plantations. This observation shows how modernization in the natural resource-abundant Africa, though considered as a sign of progress and development, is actually contradicting to the lifestyle prescribed in a modern and developed area.

This means that modernization has no place in the lives of most Africans, primarily because they have learned to survive and live despite the inconveniences that forest life presents. From this realization, readers are shown how development is interpreted from the point-of-view of those who have remarkably survived early forms of living, such as the life of hunting-gathering that the forest people have known ever since they have become part of the Ituri forest.

Apart from their lifestyle, the BaMbuti's social organization is radically different from the one established under a capitalist economic system (which is the prevalent social structure for most developed and developing nations in the 20th century). In Turnbull's study of the tribe's social structure and organization, it became apparent that the tribe had no established social system, be it political or economic in nature.

He claims that "...the BaMbuti were a single cultural unit...There was no form of chieftainship, and no mechanism for maintaining law and order, and it was difficult...to see what prevented these isolated groups from falling into complete chaos" (19). This account highlights the fact that there exists an almost egalitarian society in Ituri, a state of society wherein there is no social stratification.

In fact, the lack of any established law within the tribe is indeed a mark of the egalitarian nature of the tribe's life, an almost utopian society wherein harmony with nature and among the BaMbuti are the most important pursuits in life. Though food is an essential item for the BaMbuti, this is so only because they need food to survive forest life. Otherwise, forest life is a simple life consisting of daily conduct of activities that makes communal life harmonious and enjoyable.

Of course, the most significant insight shared by the author is how modernization is affecting the life of the forest people. The author himself expresses his apprehension with the emergence of the plantations in nearby locations at the Ituri forest, for these plantations had, evidently, detrimentally affected the life of the forest people. Turnbull best expresses his dismay over the dominance of modernization in Ituri (259-60): The plan was doomed to failure for several reasons.

For one, the Pygmies are not able to stand the direct sunlight and become ill outside the shade of the forest. They also became ill because they have no resistance, as the villagers have, to the kinds of disease they are open to in a sedentary life. Water which the villager can drink with impunity gives severe stomach disorder.