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.

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

About the Author
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.

Reviews
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



Book Information
ISBN 9781847923806
Author Colin M Turnbull
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint The Bodley Head Ltd
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 314g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 22mm