The Forest PeopleĬolin Turnbull first became famous for his 1961 book The Forest People.

Later on, Turnbull became staff member in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. One year later, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States after moving to New York City in order to become curator in charge of African Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. During the late 1950s he returned for further studies to the Belgian Congo and Uganda and he was awarded his anthropology doctorate from Oxford in 1964. During this time he became engaged to the Indian Kumari Mayor. To continue his studies, he returned to Oxford University in 1954 where he studied social anthropology (1956) and literature (1957). He was hired to assist in the construction and transportation of a boat needed for his film The African Queen, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. After his first trip to Africa, Turnbull came to Yellowknife in northwest Canada in 1953 to work as a gold digger for a short time. The African Queenĭuring his time in Africa, Turnbull also worked for Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel. After graduating from university in 1951, he travelled with Newton Beal to the Ituri rainforest of what was then the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) to the camp of Patrick Putnam and Anne Eisner-Putnam to study the Mbuti Pygmies. He was awarded a grant in the Department of Indian Religion and Philosophy, Banaras Hindu University, India, from which he graduated with a master’s degree in Indian Religion and Philosophy. He then moved to India to live in the ashram of the guru Anandamayi Ma.

During the Second World War he worked in the Royal Navy from 1942 to 1946.

He attended Westminster School and studied at Magdalen College in Oxford. His parents were Helen Dorothy Wellesley Chapman (1894-1977) and John Rutherford Turnbull (1884-1975). Early YearsĬolin Turnbull was born in the London borough of Harrow. Turnbull came to public attention with the popular books The Forest People on the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire and The Mountain People on the Ik people of Uganda, and one of the first anthropologists to work in the field of ethnomusicology. On November 23, 1924, British-American anthropologist Colin Turnbull was born.

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