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Low life

The bump in the night that changed my mind about pygmies

An idyllic place and the idealist who studied it

13 September 2014

9:00 AM

13 September 2014

9:00 AM

Music of the Forest on Radio 4 last week was a profile of the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, 1924–1994, who achieved celebrity with his book The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (1961), which presented such an inspiring vision of a prelapsarian, non-violent, egalitarian society that it became a cult classic of the counterculture.

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