Book description
Colin Turnbull lived among the Pygmies as their friend for three years.
He writes about their hunting parties, their nomadic camps, their
quarrels and love affairs, their music and their ceremonies. His is a
magnificent account of an earthly paradise and of a legendary and
utterly delightful people.
Colin Turnbull is now retired, having held a number of teaching posts
at American universities. But he received his university education and
anthropological training at Oxford, which confirmed his already
strongly humanistic feelings. For him field work was the most
important part of his career, and although 'the field' was mainly in
East and Central Africa, it was also India and Tibet, and (more
recently) Polynesia, where he lived for three years. In the United
States he was actively engaged in academic research into the prison
system, and did much work on 'death row' in a number of states, as a
result of which he emerged more strongly opposed than ever to capital
punishment, on both academic and moral grounds. The same kind of
concern for humanity shows in much of his writing.
He was ordained in India as a full Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama
in1992, although his first contact with Tibetan Buddhism was as far
back as 1949. His publications include Lonely African, The
Mountain People, Tibet (with Thubten Norbu), and The
Human cycle. He divides his time between the monastery of which
he is a member in Dharmasala, and the United States.
