Colin M. Turnbull's two works on the Mbuti Pygmie
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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 t
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l structure could be identified for the Pygmies of the Congo region. But the Pygmies are scattered in numerous, sometimes linguistically distinct, groups over thousands of square miles of dense jungle. Belief in this overall culture distracted Schebesta's attention from even very obvious fundamental differences among the people he was supposed to be observing. "Nowhere do we find Schebesta interested in a society as such" (1965, p. 155).
Yet Schebesta did subscribe to the belief that it was important to conduct detailed studies while living in a Pygmy camp. His good intentions went for little, however, since the camps in which he lived were "quite artificial" and were set up at sites of his own choosing (1965, p. 156). Schebesta had accepted the villagers' notion that they held hereditary ownership rights over Pygmy families and he simply asked the village people to send some of "their" Pygmies to him. Turnbull notes that there was no way even to tell if all the members of the camp were members of one hunting band -- the basic economic and social unit of the Pygmy camp.
In addition, Schebesta's condescension and insensitivity could not have been conducive to inspiring "the trust and confidence necessary to secure reliabl
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Approximate Word count = 1802
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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