''The Forest People'' (1961) is

Colin Turnbull Colin 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 ...

's ethnographic study of the Mbuti pygmies of the Uturi Forest in then- Belgian Congo. In this book, the British-American

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

detailed his three years spent with the community in the late 1950s. The style is informal and accessible. Turnbull contrasts his forest-living subjects' lifestyle with that of nearby town-dwelling Africans and evaluates the interactions of the two groups. The editor for the book was Michael Korda who attended Oxford University with Turnbull. ''The Forest People'' was the version for a general readership of Turnbull's academic thesis, which was published in an expanded, more technical form by Routledge in London as ''Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies'' (1965). Turnbull wrote about his experiences with the tribe from a first person perspective. The Mbuti tribe respected him, and attempted to show him their cultural prospects as a society until a drastic change in their lifestyles occurred.

References

External links

Smithsonian listing
of documentary footage of the area and communities described in the book
BaMbuti Pygmies @ National Geographic Magazine
National Geographic Feature in September 2005 {{DEFAULTSORT:Forest People, The Anthropology books 1961 non-fiction books African Pygmies Simon & Schuster books Belgian Congo Books about the Democratic Republic of the Congo