Misuse of Arcadia

THE MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

by COLIN TURNBULL

309 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

Colin Turnbull is an anthropologist shouting from the bottom of a very unpleasant moral pit that he seems to have dug with his own shovel. Turnbull practices total-immersion anthropology of the kind that Margaret Mead (a senior colleague of his at the American Museum of Natural History) made famous when as a young woman she went to live with tribes in Samoa and New Guinea. Though he lacks Mead's robust good sense, Turnbull is well remembered for The Forest People, which he wrote a decade ago about his years with the Pygmies of the Congo.

The Forest People was a charming, elegiac book about a "people...infinitely wise" and "without evil" who confirmed, the author said, "how the qualities of truth, goodness and beauty can be found wherever we care to look for them." Now, after living for two years in the highlands of north Uganda with a very different group of natives, called the Ik, Turnbull seems pursued by an equally simple but opposite conviction. The Ik, in Turnbull's description, are a paradigm of human nastiness. Their habits, he says, it "would be an insult to animals to call bestiality." By the end of this book the author's repulsion clots into hatred, in a crescendo of extraordinary statements: "Luckily the Ik are not numerous--about 2,000--and those two years reduced their number greatly. So I am hopeful that their isolation will remain as complete as in the past, until they die out completely." Why? Because, he says, "the Ik teach us that our much vaunted human values are not inherent in humanity at all." There is no denying the Ik are ignoble savages. Turnbull reconstructs their past--often on the basis of what he admits is "guess-work"--as a once more numerous society that hunted the broad valley below their present home, retreating only seasonally into the mountains. Creation of a game reserve a generation ago penned the Ik into the mountains, forcing them to farming. Then they were afflicted by drought, hunger, isolation, technical inadequacy, disease.

Turnbull relates the ghastly results, a breakdown of social relations so total that today healthy men and women, given food in plenty for their families, will gobble and gorge until they vomit, rather than share anything even with their infants. It was common, he writes, "to see the very young prying open the mouths of the very old and pulling out food they had been chewing." Children are torpid and withdrawn. If a man's wife falls by the trailside, he will leave her to die, then grumble if someone else robs the body first. The old, weak or blind will be tripped, pushed off balance, and at the last ignored as though dead while still alive. "Misfortune of others was their greatest joy," says Turnbull. "There is no goodness left for the Ik, only a full stomach."

Turnbull compiles the details of the Ik's anti-Arcadia with the obsessive repetitiveness of a man who cannot get his hands clean. Incredibly, he asserts that the Ik way of life is contagious. The Ik have power, he writes, "to work their magic around them--perpetuating their survival system." A theologian might recognize the source of Turnbull's trouble more quickly than a brother anthropologist: Turnbull has discovered the reality of evil. The shock has tumbled him from the single Pelagian optimism about man's moral perfectibility that he entertained in his Pygmy days into another error, radical pessimism about man's depravity.

The best tradition of anthropology has been to celebrate alternative ways of living. The temptation has been to overstate the lessons. Tough, well-stuffed minds like Margaret Mead's have created their classics by permitting the reader to draw the minatory comparisons. But recent pop social science has been less fastidious. Turnbull, in an enormous magnification, projects his ghastly pictures of Ik guilt onto the future of Western technological society. "In one dramatic generation, they have leaped ahead and given us a taste of things to come," he writes, and "they have replaced human society with a mere survival system that does not take human emotions into account."

The Ik in their desolation are no longer a tribal society, as Turnbull must know: they lack the social structure to bear the weight of the thesis he tries to lay upon them. -Horace Judson

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