Book Review 4: The Mountain People by Colin Turnbull

You’ll never guess who put me on to this book. It was John Cleese, yes that John Cleese, via his book “Life and How to Survive It”, a sequel to his first volume which had walked me through my parents' divorce a couple of years back. Both his books come highly recommended if you fancy reading a chat between John Cleese and one of his close friends, psychiatrist Robin Skynner.

So anyway, back to the Mountain People. John Cleese thinks that Colin Turnbull has written a very important and necessary book. It is an anthropological study of the Ik, an African tribe that used to be fairly generous and gregarious until their normal resources were cut-off when a national park was created. The Ik culture was destroyed by the extreme deprivation they were facing, to the point that they led an absolutely selfish and loveless life. When they found food, they would never share it. They would rejoice and laugh at each other’s suffering. Turnbull was most distressed to observe that, by the end of his study, he had picked up their behaviour as well. He had become just as cold and uncaring as they were. He had to struggle for months afterwards to recover his soul.

Since then, I’ve always thought that my life should be about preventing that kind of deprivation at all costs. I’m not overly optimistic about human nature: regular people are not little Gandhis; they’ll probably get very nasty if they lack the basics. The absolute lack of material well-being and security can destroy their love and plunge them further into exile. Just like the generous, nurturing Christian culture can be utterly destroyed by narratives of capitalism, social Darwinism and suchlike.

The book’s dedication reads as follows: “To the Ik, whom I learned to love, and to Joe who taught me”. Joe was Turnbull’s academic mentor. My own dissertation advisor is also called Joe, and he’s got that gentle monastic touch with students which I hope will rub off on me one day. For all its flaws, on days like these, I love my British Harry Potter Uni in the shadow of Durham Cathedral.



P.S. Please note that this is a rather old study. Nobody does social science like this anymore. Today it would be considered a huge, massive breach of ethics to leave the Ik to their situation while the researcher was being approvisioned independently. Still, at the time this study was conducted, there was an ethics of non-interference with the field. You were expected to just observe and to leave the field untouched.