The Forest People

The Forest People (1961) is Colin Turnbull's ethnographic study of the Mbuti pygmies of the then-Belgian Congo (later Zaire and now Democratic Republic of Congo).

In the widely popular book, the British-American anthropologist detailed his three years spent with the community in the late 1950s. The style is informal and accessible. Turnbull contrasts his forest-living subjects' lifestyle with that of nearby town-dwelling Africans and evaluates the interactions of the two groups.

The Forest People was the popular version of Turnbull's academic thesis, which was published in an expanded, more technical form by Routledge in London as Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies (1965).

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