In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin M. Turnbull

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Colin Turnbull (1924-94) made his reputation with two bestselling works of popular anthropology that tell diametrically opposed tales. The Forest People (1962) holds up the central African Pygmies as examples of the human capacity for communal goodness and love, while The Mountain People (1973) argues that Uganda's Ik tribe, threatened by a killing famine, had cast aside those qualities in favor of soulless individualism. Turnbull's life was as controversial and rife with contradictions as his books, fellow anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker reveals in this absorbing biography. Born in England, Turnbull roamed the world and eventually made his home in America. Product of a conventional, privileged upbringing, he saw himself as a champion for the world's oppressed. He infused anthropology with a passion some deemed unscientific but general readers found electrifying. He was openly homosexual despite the threat this posed to his academic career, which was never his top priority. The love of Turnbull's life was an African American man; he proclaimed Joe Towles's brilliance but was ambivalent about his lover gaining financial independence, and their 29-year relationship was marred by violence and infidelities. Nonetheless, Joe's 1988 death devastated Turnbull, who also succumbed to AIDS six years later. Grinker displays both discernment and critical sympathy in this gripping chronicle of a tumultuous life.


From Publishers Weekly
Cultural anthropologist Colin Turnbull (1924-1994) earned his reputation with bestsellers like The Forest People, his classic study of African Pygmies. In this groundbreaking biography, Grinker sheds much light on Turnbull's largely hidden private life. The London-born son of a possessive Irish mother and a stern Scottish father, Turnbull rebelled against his privileged background, identifying with non-Westernized peoples whom he saw as oppressed or marginalized. After graduating from Oxford, he went to India in 1949 and lived in the ashram of his female guru, Sri Anandamayi Ma. Grinker, who holds Turnbull's former chair as anthropology professor at George Washington University, suggests that this experience later inspired Turnbull consciously to try to join the people he studied. On the more intimate side, Grinker also chronicles Turnbull's 30-year love with Joseph Towles, a young African-American actor with whom he lived openly as a gay, interracial couple in a conservative rural Virginia town. Though Turnbull idealized the relationship, Grinker reveals that it was marked by violent fights, plus Towles's abuse of drugs and alcohol; he also portrays Turnbull as a domineering partner who pushed Towles into an anthropology career. Among the other little-known facets of Turnbull's life and work that Grinker illuminates in this fair-minded, superb biography is his advocacy on behalf of death row inmates. Yet Grinker does little to enhance Turnbull's stature as an anthropologist; he contends that Turnbull, who greatly exaggerated the amount of time he spent living among the Pygmies, often simplistically used noble "primitive" societies merely as a foil to condemn Western civilization. Photos. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Grinker's portrait is at once a love story, a psychological profile, and a scientific biography of the controversial Scottish American anthropologist. Turnbull was both credited with doing landmark on African native populations and criticized for subjectivity and his openly gay lifestyle. His longest and most complex relationship, which he characterized as a marriage, was an African American variously his lover, protege, colleague, and metaphor for the continent he came to love, and by extension, the world's disadvantaged. Thus the title. Grinker (Houses in the Rainforest) began by wanting to debunk Turnbull's scholarship, but his own studies and experiences of Africa and his growing understanding of Turnbull's background and personality led instead to insightful respect -- though never adulation. Thoroughly researched and highly readable, this biography will earn a place in both academic and popular collections.Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Tobias Schneebaum, Washington Post Book World
"Whatever you think of him as a scholar -- some consider him brilliant, others overrated -- Turnbull was an original."


From Booklist
Grinker originally intended to debunk what was considered the overromanticized work of famed Scottish anthropologist Colin M. Turnbull and ended up writing a fascinating biography of the complicated relationship between Turnbull's life and his work. Turnbull's celebrity, equivalent to that of Margaret Mead, was based on his extensive study of the African Pygmies in the 1950s. His fascination with their passion for life and nature became entwined with Turnbull's own search for a more spiritual life, which led him to the Buddhist religion. His search for companionship led him to a 30-year homosexual interracial relationship with Joseph Towles, an African American. When they met, Towles was in his 20s and was starting a career in acting and writing. Turnbull spent the remainder of their lives together trying to transform Towles into an anthropological scholar. The two traveled and worked together, at Turnbull's insistence, until Towles died of AIDS in 1988. Grinker recounts the turbulent nature of the relationship as the two men struggled with their different backgrounds: Turnbull the famous anthropologist of privileged origins and Towles a man made doubly outcast from American society by virtue of his race and sexual orientation. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


New York Daily News
"Grinker tells a vivid love story that is also a gripping intellectual voyage...Biography at its very best."



"Moving with extraordinary grace from the intimate to the epic, Grinker tells a vivid love story that is also a gripping intellectual voyage."



"A fascinating and carefully balanced biography of a truly extraordinary man"



"I love this book … a splendid biography, utterly honest and forthright, showing us what few want to admit--that anthropology is as much art as science."


Publishers Weekly
"...fair-minded, superb biography...."


Emily Nussbaum, Lingua Franca
"A sympathetic and deeply moving biography...the resulting memoir is a love letter, but a nuanced one."


POZ
"No dusty tome, In the Arms of Africa has all the sweep and heartbreak of a David Lean epic."


Book Description
Colin Turnbull was an anthropologist second in renown only to Margaret Mead, he was acclaimed for his groundbreaking study of the Central African Pygmies. But little has been known about his equally exotic personal life until now. A man of privilege and formidable education, Turnbull poured the full force of his personality into that of his lover of 30 years, a poor African-American named Joe. After Joe's death from AIDS in 1988, he renounced most of his friendships, gave away most of his money, and until his own death from AIDS in 1994, lived as a Buddhist monk.


About the Author
Roy Richard Grinker, author of a book about Pygmies, Houses in the Rainforest, lives in Washington DC.


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No dusty tome, In the Arms of Africa has all the sweep and heartbreak of a David Lean epic.Read all 9 "From The Critics" >


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