the Pygmies had already begun to feel pressure from displaced African peoples who had, in historical times, begun to infiltrate the area and from the more recent colonizing efforts of the Europeans.
Pygmy interactions with village tribes and Europeans were beginning to take their toll. By the time Turnbull undertook his field research such work had acquired "considerable urgency" (1965, p. 147). The hunting and gathering economy of the Mbuti was undergoing changes as the people adapted to encroaching forces. Turnbull's field work focused not only on Mbuti lives but on their great, if superficial, adaptability and "their much more profound resistance to any influence that strikes into the heart of their forest world and forest life" (1965 147). In The forest people (1961) Turnbull strove to convey a sense of what the unique relationship between the Mbuti and their forest is like. But, as he warned, it was a way of living "that will soon be gone forever, and with it the people" (1961, p. 5).
Because of the scarcity of ethnographic material Turnbull's survey (1965) could be organized around Schebesta's published works and the, mostly unpublished, field notes of anthropologist Patrick Putnam and his wife, Anne. Schebesta primarily studied the Efe Mbuti, who hunted with bow and arrow, while the Putnams studied the Sua Mbuti, who hunted with nets. The Mbuti Pygmies (1965) is a complete survey of all available data about the material cu
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