Colin M. Turnbull's two works on the Mbuti Pygmies represent two very different approaches to ethnography. The Mbuti Pygmies: An Ethnographic Survey (1965) was originally written in 1956 as Turnbull's thesis at Oxford University. This work was published in 1965 with a limited number of revisions. The thesis is a description of all the known ethnographic facts about the Pygmies of the Congo region. In the years 1957-1958, however, Turnbull had made an extended stay among the Mbuti. Though Turnbull had visited the Mbuti earlier, the 1957 stay was undertaken as intensive field research in which he studied the single Mbuti hunting band with whom he lived. An account of this field work was published in 1961 as The forest people. The Mbuti Pygmies (1965) surveys all the data accumulated by previous travelers and anthropologists and was a necessary preliminary to the field work Turnbull was about to undertake. The ethnographic survey demonstrated that very little was known about the Mbuti and that most of what was known was open to question since the methodologies of previous researchers left much to be desired. The survey served, therefore, to raise the questions that directed much of Turnbull's field research.
Turnbull's work provided the first summary of European knowledge of the Mbuti (1965) and the first reliable picture of Pygmy life (1961) and the comparison of these works also provides an important perspective on the fate of the Mbuti. Turnbull notes that from the time of the first extant record of Pygmies in ancient Egypt, "our knowledge of them decreases steadily until the late nineteenth century" when they were widely dismissed as a myth (1965, p. 149). But Western Europeans had begun their exploration of Central Africa and the literature was suddenly full of casual, often mistaken, observations about Pygmies. By the time Paul Schebesta undertook the first organized anthropological research, in the 1930s and 1940s,...