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The Forest People
  • Published: 15 October 2015
  • ISBN: 9781847923806
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $55.00

The Forest People

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A life-enhancing account of a remote people living in harmony with nature and one of the great classics of anthropology

The Forest People is an astonishingly intimate and life-enhancing account of a hunter-gatherer tribe living in harmony with nature -- and an all-time classic of anthropology.

For three years, Colin Turnbull lived with an isolated group of Pygmies deep in the forest of the African Congo, experiencing their daily life first-hand. He attended their hunting parties and initiation ceremonies, witnessed their music and their rituals, observed their quarrels and love affairs. He documented them as an anthropologist but was accepted among them as a friend.

A ground-breaking work in its time, The Forest People made him one of the most famous intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. It remains a transporting account of an earthly paradise and of a legendary and fascinating people.

With a new foreword by Horatio Clare.
  • Published: 15 October 2015
  • ISBN: 9781847923806
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $55.00

About the author

Colin M Turnbull

Colin Turnbull (1924-94) was a British-born anthropologist specialising in the people of Africa and their music. With the publication of The Forest People, a scientifically rigorous but nonetheless openly admiring portrait of a people who live in apparent harmony with their natural environment, he became one of the most famous intellectuals of the 1960s and ’70s. A decade later, he published a controversial companion study, The Mountain People, which portrayed a society displaced from its land who had become ruthless and selfish. In his later years, he did much work on ‘death row’ in the USA and argued strongly against capital punishment. He was ordained in India as a full Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama in 1992.
CMT

Praise for The Forest People

Life-enhancing, extraordinarily vivid … It is impossible to praise this book too highly

Listener

A book of quite exceptional charm

New Statesman

The reader feels sheer delight in an entirely new world

Margaret Mead

Amazing ... It inspired me to seek out wild places

Ray Mears