What's New - Home - Login

He was born in London and educated at Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford where he studied politics and philosophy. World War II brought a stint in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve after which he was awarded a two year grant in the Department of Indian Religion and Philosophy, Banaras Hindu University, India, from which he graduated with a master's degree in Indian Religion and Philosophy. In 1951, after his graduation from Banaras, he traveled to the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (then, the Belgian Congo) with Newton Beal, an Ohio schoolteacher he'd meet in India. Turnbull and Beal first studied the BaMbuti pygmies during this time, though that was not the complete goal of the trip.

An "odd job" Turnbull picked up while in Africa at this time was working for the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel. Spiegel hired Turnbull to assist in the construction and transportation of a boat needed for his film. This boat was The African Queen, which was used for the film of the same title (starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn; 1951). After his first trip to Africa, Turnbull traveled to Yellowknife in the northwest territories of Canada, where he worked as a geologist and gold miner for approximately a year, before he went back to school to obtain another degree.

Upon returning to Oxford in 1954, he began specializing in the anthropology of Africa. Turnbull remained in Oxford for two years before another field trip to Africa, finally focusing on the then-Belgian Congo (1957—58) and Uganda. After years of fieldwork, he finally achieved his anthropology doctorate from Oxford in 1964.

Turnbull became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1965, after he had been named curator in charge of African Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in 1959 and moved to New York City. He later took up residence in Lancaster County, Virginia and was on staff in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. Other professional associations included Corresponding Membership of Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale and fellowship in the British Royal Anthropological Institute. He first gained prominence with his book The Forest People (1961), an admiring study of the BaMbuti. In 1972, he wrote a sequel of sorts, the highly controversial The Mountain People, which was concerned with Uganda's hunger-plagued Ik tribe.

Turnbull was an unconventional scholar who rejected neutrality. He idealized the BaMbuti and reviled the Ik, and described the latter as lacking any sense of altruism, in that they force their children out of their homes at the age of three, and gorge on whatever occasional excesses of food they might find until they became sick, rather than save or share. However, several anthropologists have since argued that a particularly serious famine suffered by the Ik during the period of Turnbull's visit may have distorted their normal behavior and customs, and some passages in his book make it clear that the behavior and customs of the Ik during the period he describes were drastically different from what was normal for them before they were uprooted from their original way of life.

Joseph Allen Towles was born in Senora, Virginia on August 17, 1937. In 1957 he moved to New York City to pursue a career as an actor and writer. He met Turnbull in 1959 and they exchanged marriage vows the following year.

Towles' initiation into anthropology occurred as a volunteer in the Anthropology Department at the American Museum of Natural History with Turnbull. From 1965 to 1967, he assisted with the creation of the "Man in Africa Hall", a permanent exhibit later called the "Hall of African Peoples." He also researched and constructed the "Slavery in the New World" subsection of the museum. In 1963, he entered Pace College to study history and anthropology, graduating in 1968. He received his Ph.D. from Makerere University in 1979.

From 1965 to 1967, Turnbull and Towles conducted fieldwork among the Ik of Northern Ugandawere in Africa. In the Congo in 1970, they conducted fieldwork on the Nkumbi circumcision initiation ritual for boys and the Asa myth of origin among the Mbo of the Ituri forest.

In 1979, they traveled the world studying the concept of tourism as pilgrimage. Towles next turned to biblical research and writing plays and novels. He reacted angrily to Turnbull's semi-autobiographical work The Human Cycle (1983), which omitted all references to their relationship. Towles' health declined slowly from that time. He died from complications of AIDS in 1988.

Turnbull arranged for Towles' research to be published posthumously. It appeared in 1993 as Nkumbi initiation ritual and structure among the Mbo of Zaïre and as Asa: Myth of Origin of the Blood Brotherhood Among the Mbo of the Ituri Forest, both in Annales of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium), vol. 137.

Late in life Turnbull took up the political cause of death row inmates. After his partner's death, Turnbull donated all his belongings to the United Negro College Fund. He donated all their research materials, most of which were the product of his career, to the College of Charleston, insisting that the collection be known under Towles' name alone. In 1989, he moved to Bloomington, Indiana to participate to the building of Tibetan Cultural Center with his friend Thupten Jigme Norbu, elder brother of the 14th Dalai-lama. Later he moved to Dharamsala, India where he took the monks' vow of Tibetan Buddhism, given to him by the Dalai Lama.

He died in Virginia in 1994, aged 69, like Towles from complications of AIDS.

• The Forest People, 1961 ISBN 0-586-05940-7
• The Lonely African, 1962 ISBN 0671200690
• The Peoples of Africa, 1962
• The Mbuti Pygmies: An Ethnographic Survey in Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 50, 139-282
• Wayward Servants; The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies, 1965 ISBN 0-8371-7927-0
• Tradition and Cange in African Tribal Life, 1966
• Tibet: Its History, Religion and People (with Thubten Jigme Norbu), 1968 ISBN 0-7011-1354-5
• The Mountain People, 1972 ISBN 0-671-64098-4
• Africa and Change, editor, 1973 ISBN 0-394-31520-0
• Man in Africa, 1976 ISBN 0-14-022035-6
• The Human Cycle, 1983 ISBN 0-586-08493-2
• Change and Adaptation, 1983 ISBN 0-03-061537-2

Research fields

• African Pygmies
• Hunter gatherers
• BaMbuti People

Other researchers who studied pygmy cultures

• Simha Arom
• Mauro Campagnoli
• Roy Richard Grinker