In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin Turnbull
by Roy Richard Grinker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Roy Richard GrinkerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-11-01
ISBN: 0226309045
Number of pages: 375
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Book Reviews of In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin Turnbull
Book Review: Another fallen idol!
Summary: 3 Stars
In the preface of a book which I published a year or so ago, I mentioned how much Turnbull's famous "The Forest People" influenced me. One reader alerted me to Grinker's biography. I am not sure my evaluation of it is as much a comment on the book as on Turnbull's life. It has been exactly forty years since I read about the Mbuti. I had just returned from canoeing in the Arctic and my faith in life in Cambridge Massachusetts where I taught was deeply shaken by my experience in the wild. In Colin Turnbull's Pygmies I found some kind of solace. I don't remember if I later read "The Mountain People." If I did, it has left no trace.
Plain and simple, I don't like Colin Turnbull, as a human being, nor do I like this biography of him. Reading Amy Wallace's biography of Carlos Castaneda confirmed what I suspected after his third volume, "Journey to Ixtlan," that he was a con man and moreover a destructive person despite his early genius. When it was first published I used "The Teachings of Don Juan" in a graduate field methods class I was teaching and its effect on the students was so profound that they could not discuss it. In retrospect it is clear that Castaneda made most of it up and by the third volume admitted his own failing at the Zen-like lessons he was trying to teach. After that, what he wrote only appealed to his cult followers. Those (particularly women) who got close to him, he abused, and he failed his much vaunted teachings about making death an ally.
As did Turnbull's early anthropological critics, I now see that his writings are Castaneda-like. They offered a needed critique of current society but neither author lived up what they advocated in their works and both were extreme narcissists. Both used the people around them and did not give some who were very important to their achievement credit. Turnbull wrote some of his coworkers out of his works. Of the two Turnbull was much more deft and had a greater diversity of experience. He must have been a cross between some kind of genius, both social and intellectual, and a sociopath, bending people to his desires while maintaining a narcissist's self absorption. Because he put this narcissism on a stage I wonder about Grinker's motive in writing this bio. Grinker seems to be a good man, having written about African natives, Korea, and now autism, but there is some level at which Grinker misses the failure of Turnbull in his spiritual quest. Early on Grinker says that because in his youthful bravado he was so intellectually critical of Turnbull that he, Grinker, turned down Turnbull's offer to help him with his Africa studies. The books seems like an apologia for his spurning of what he later realized was Turnbull's generous offer. There are significant parts of Turnbull's life that were inaccessible to Grinker. Turnbull only left an autobiographical manuscript eulogizing his homosexual partner. A number of people who knew Turnbull well would not talk to the author, including some of Turnbull's family, contemporary academics and the Tibetan Buddhist teacher who encouraged Turnbull to take some vows but who eventually broke with him in an unexplained incident. I know Grinker's dissertation and first book reexamined Turnbull's work among the Mbuti. And Grinker says that Turnbull's field notes are excellent anthropology. But in this volume we are given only an overview of the contributions and criticisms of Turnbull's work while we are treated to, from my point of view, too many stories about Turnbull's sexuality and the chaos of his personal life with his partner. It seems like Grinker abetted Turnbull's wish to keep his inner motives hidden while putting his partner in center stage.
Although it hard to discern Turnbull's relationship to his spiritual teacher in India when Turnbull was in his twenties, Turnbull's time in Tibetan robes at the end of his life was a failure, and Grinker doesn't seem to recognize that. Turnbull complains about Westerner's in Dharmsala when he was there in the early nineties: how superficial they were. This is more of his narcissism. There had been westerners practicing there for twenty years before he arrived and Western monastics and lay persons who not only had thoroughly studied Tibetan ideas but who had achieved high levels of practice. Grinker doesn't realize that Turnbull's comments that the Mbuti were somehow much more naturally spiritual than the Buddhists indicate how little Turnbull (and Grinker) understood what the Buddhist agenda is. Even though one can find some analogue between Buddhist ideas of emptiness and impermanence and Mbuti attitudes towards existence, the two are not comparable, A good place to explore this is Gananath Obeyesekere's book, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth, or mine.
So where does that leave us with this biography. To start I suppose on needs to go back and read Turnbull's books on the Mbuti and the IK. He loved the former and thoroughly disliked the latter, even advocating their deracination. Then read Turnbull's contemporary advocates and critics and Grinker's own work, Houses in the Rainforest: Ethnicity and Inequality Among Farmers and Foragers in Central Africa. That is a lot of work just to set the record straighter for a felled idol and to see how adequate the biography of him is. Somehow Malinowksi's journal entry, "living among the niggers and hating them," jaundiced me to his anthropology ever since. Similarly the apt criticisms of Turnbull that his books are more projections of himself--- projection of authenticity and alignment with nature on to the Mbuti which fed my soul once and inhumanity on to the IK--- have soured me on his work. And as Turnbull's partner pointed out, Turnbull's selfishness in not lifting a hand to help the starving IK was inhumane even though rationalized as scientific objectivity, an objectivity he didn't seem to adhere to with the Pygmies he adored. The one point in Turnbull's life I think I would have liked to have witnessed was at the beginning of his partner's AIDS when the two of them were occupying the same academic lecture stage and engaged in lively discussions of their different takes on the IK and the forest people.
Since I am not much of a theatre person, I don't know what to make of Turnbull's relationship to Peter Brook who Grinker says was the most talented stage director of the last century. In dramatizing IK starvation Brook and Turnbull may have put the issue before the public in an effective way, even though, as his critics pointed out, Turnbull made the causes of IK behavior cultural and did not compare their responses to people undergoing analogous depravations like concentration camps or other famines. To redeem Turnbull's life it may be better to see it more as a piece of theatre than a search for truth. Finally Turnbull's denial of his own AIDS endangered people around him. This was a deadly selfish act.
Charlie Fisher, emeritus prof. and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World
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