The Forest People By Colin Turnbull

The Forest People, by Colin Turnbull was written in 1961. It follows his accounts among the BaMbuti Pygmies in the rainforest of the Belgian-Congo (now known as the Ituri forest in northeastern Zaire). This was said to be the last group of pygmies. These people are one of the few hunter-gatherer groups left of their kind. The book was written while Turnbull spent three years with the group of Pygmies in the late 1950s. His writing is very informal as he studies this tribe and also compares and contrasts the group of Pygmies to Africans in a local town (newer tribe). He takes the BaMbuti tribe (pygmies) who are perhaps a 10,000-year-old tribe, and he compares them to a group in the Bantu village, who lives right next to the forest and are a more recent tribe. He begins his writing by introducing the readers to the pygmies. He goes through and introduces multiple families and their family members, making it more real. He introduces Ekianga and his multiple wives, Kenge, and others. The names are strange and he gets to know many so it can be hard to keep track. He explains how as western people there is an initial fear of the forest and that this fear is alike those of the villagers near the forest. This can be true for any western born person, or anyone unfamiliar with life in the forest. The villagers have a reason for their fear though, they believe in lots of magic and spiritual things and they believe that the dark forest is full of evil spirits and magic. Turnbull then continues to introduce the readers to the forest through the eyes of the tribe. It shows the intimate knowledge that the tribe has on where and when to get food, and also how to predict predators. It turns the forest environment from intimidating and unknown, to ...

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...h as different religions or different practices. But I now understand that some cultures are completely different from my own. That even though I think something may be right, another culture probably has a very different view on it. Or something that I think is common, others do not. For instance, getting your period. I would have assumed that getting your period was the same for every teenage girl, scary because blood is coming out of you but just a part of life and something you accept. But after reading this book I learned that is not necessarily true. The pygmies celebrated it and called it and the villagers cursed it and thought of it as a curse. Overall I learned many new things from reading this book, I was able to learn about a different culture and society, relate it to our class, and also learn more overall about culture diversity and changes in society.