| The Forest People | |
| Author: | Colin Turnbull |
| Orig Lang Code: | English |
| Language: | English |
| Subject: | Anthropology |
| Genre: | Non-fiction |
| Set In: | Africa |
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Pub Date: | 1961 |
| Isbn: | 0671266500 |
The Forest People (1961) is Colin Turnbull's ethnographic study of the Mbuti pygmies of the Uturi Forest in then-Belgian Congo.
In this book, the British-American anthropologist 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.[1]
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.