November 2020
Ms. Dana Canedy
Senior Vice President and Publisher of Simon & Schuster
Dear Ms. Canedy,
We are writing in regards to a book Simon and Schuster published in 1972: The Mountain People, an ethnography about the Ik people of Uganda written by Colin Turnbull. At the time of its publication, Turnbull was famous thanks to his previous book, The Forest People, which was about the Mbuti of the Ituri Forest. Perhaps because of that fame, The Mountain People was reviewed not only in the usual scholarly journals but also in such popular publications as The New York Times and Time magazine. As a result, it became a bestseller, and it remains in print and is required reading in many college courses even today, nearly fifty years after its publication.
While Turnbull had depicted the Mbuti very favorably, he argued that the Ik, in contrast, were the most selfish, mean, and antisocial people on Earth. He attributed their meanness to their culture, which, he argued, was an adaptation to conditions of chronic scarcity. Turnbull found Ik behavior and culture so morally repugnant that he advocated that they be forcibly and randomly “rounded up in something approaching a military operation” without regard to “age, sex, or kinship” “in small units of about ten” and then “taken to parts of Uganda sufficiently remote for them not to be able to return” to their home as a way of eliminating the culture traits, including their language, that he believed led them to be so selfish.
Although some anthropologists expressed skepticism about Turnbull’s claims about the Ik, many scholars accepted them enthusiastically. Margaret Mead, Desmond Morris, Ashley Montagu, and Carleton Coon all provided glowing quotes for the book’s dust jacket, and Richard Dawkins referred to Turnbull’s account of the Ik in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene in which he argued that, when it comes to explaining human behavior, culture is the only game in town.
In 2014, two of us, Lee Cronk, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, and Athena Aktipis, a psychologist at Arizona State University, co-founded The Human Generosity Project (http://humangenerosity.org), a transdisciplinary effort to better understand generosity and other forms of human cooperation through fieldwork, experiments, and computer models. We included the Ik as one of our field sites precisely because Turnbull’s depiction of them challenged so many ideas about human generosity and cooperation. The primary author of this letter, Cathryn Townsend, was hired as a postdoctoral fellow to conduct the fieldwork with Ik. She spent all of 2016 among the Ik, with return visits in 2017 and 2018. Athena and Lee also visited the area briefly in 2016.
Cathryn found that, contrary to Turnbull’s claims, the Ik are actually quite generous and cooperative, and their culture includes many traits that encourage generosity. For example, a common Ik adage is tomora marang’, meaning “it is good to share.” Many Ik also believe in kijawika, earth spirits who monitor human behavior and then reward the generous and punish the selfish. To get quantitative data on Ik generosity that could be compared with similar data from societies around the world, Cathryn ran an experimental game. She found that Ik participants were just as generous as people in other societies around the world who have played the same game. Details about her work can be found in the attached pdf of an article recently published in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences as well as in this article she recently wrote for Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/why-were-the-ik-people-vilified-as-selfish-and-nasty
Where did Turnbull go wrong? He studied the Ik in the mid-1960s when they happened to be suffering from a severe famine. Although Turnbull was aware of the famine, he attributed the selfish behaviors he observed not to the deprivations and desperation it was causing but rather to Ik culture. It appears that, like many cultural anthropologists, Turnbull could see only one explanation for human behavior: culture. As is now clear, it is always important to consider the possibility that factors other than culture, including but not limited to starvation, may also influence human behavior.
Although the Ik are quite isolated, many of them are fully aware of how Turnbull described them, and they do not appreciate it. They, and we, see the continued availability of The Mountain People without any attempt to correct its many errors as an injustice. Consider, for example, this statement from Charles Oodong, a young leader in the Ik community:
“Turnbull’s incorrect portrayal of the Ik way of life convinced a lot of people that we Ik are unfriendly, unkind and selfish. That incorrect portrayal should be corrected to change people’s minds.”
We are not writing to ask you to stop publishing The Mountain People. It is a well established, if flawed, work of scholarship, and it should remain available to anyone interested in the Ik or in the effects of severe famine on human behavior. But it should not be available unaccompanied by any attempt to set the record straight about the Ik. Therefore, the purpose of this email is to ask you to consider reissuing The Mountain People with a new foreword written by Cathryn Townsend and Charles Oodong. As you can see from her essay in Aeon, Cathryn does not lack empathy for Colin Turnbull. Rather than simply refuting Turnbull’s claims, Cathryn’s & Charles’s foreword would place them in their proper context and provide a platform for an Ik perspective on these matters to be heard. If a new print run of the book is impractical, then perhaps it could be reissued, with a new foreword, as an e-book. Given that it is required reading in many college courses and that this new forward would provide important context that would add to the value of the book, you could be assured of sales.
A few months ago, Lee Cronk ran this idea past your colleague Richard Rhorer. He declined on the grounds that “Simon & Schuster would not, without a direct request from the author or whomever controls his work, amend the book with an essay from another scholar.” This is Lee’s reply to his message:
“Dear Mr. Rhorer,
“Thank you for your quick reply. As a living author of several books myself, I understand your reasoning. I would certainly want to be consulted before any of my books were reissued, with or without a new foreword. However, as a future dead author, I ask you to reconsider.
“As you may know, Colin Turnbull passed away in 1994. It is common for scholarly books to be reprinted again and again for many years after the deaths of their authors with new forewords and introductions by other scholars that contextualize, often very critically, the work of the original author. This kind of repackaging can make old works relevant to new audiences.
“Science is not simply the accumulation of knowledge. Instead, it progresses in fits and starts and does so along a winding path. Research that is flawed, as was Turnbull’s on the Ik, plays an important role in that process. Scientists, like everyone else, learn both from their own mistakes and from those of others. A new foreword or introduction would transform The Mountain People from what it is now – a flawed ethnography that continues to mislead people about the Ik and about the causes of human behavior – into an important lesson about the messy, imperfect, but still very important process of scientific research.”
We hope you agree with us that a new edition of The Mountain People, complete with a foreword or preface by Cathryn Townsend and Charles Oodong, would be an important contribution to the scholarly literature and a badly needed correction of the injustice the book has been doing to the Ik for nearly fifty years.
If this would require permission from whoever controls the rights to The Mountain People, we would be happy to seek that permission. We would just need to know who does control those rights.
Thank you for taking the time to consider this proposal. We look forward to your reply.
Best wishes,
Cathryn Townsend, Lee Cronk & Athena Aktipis.